The Moon’s far side could open a window into the universe before the first stars were born
The Moon’s far side could give astronomers access to radio signals from the cosmic “dark ages,” a period before the first stars and galaxies formed. The idea has moved beyond theory. NASA’s first lunar radio telescope has already operated on the Moon, while LuSEE-Night is being prepared for a far-side landing and new missions such as CosmoCube are taking shape. Astronomers are also racing against a new problem: growing lunar activity could contaminate one of the quietest radio environments available anywhere near Earth. The far side of the Moon is a battered landscape of mountains, basins and overlapping craters, strikingly different from the broad dark plains familiar to anyone looking up from Earth. But its most valuable feature for astronomers may be something that cannot be seen at all. The Moon itself blocks much of the radio noise pouring outward from Earth. With virtually no atmosphere to distort very low-frequency signals, the far side offers an observing environment unavailable to telescopes on our planet. NASA now describes it as the only known place in the …
