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We started discussing this in the "What's the best telescope" thread (begun by dickbill) in the Free Chat folder (12 August 2003).
What would it take to get a telescope comparable to Hubble on the moon, sans human presence on the moon? How difficult would it be, particularly if the telescope were on the moon's dark side?
I'm all for this idea...just don't know how feasible it is.
--Cindy
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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If you combined it with the von nemann concept of self-replicating machines to build it in place, then you could quite feasibly build a telescope larger than any on earth with better view than any on earth.
Ive been a long term advocate of sending machines to the moon to do our dirty work, and a telescope on the moon would be a good first stepping-stone to both prove the technology and provide a decent, small and immediate application capable of being useful straight away.
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We can imagine several lunokods, like 3 or 4, with a relatively small telescope piggyback, say a 1 meter diameter (made by Obsession for Josh !) which automatically drive and position themself at some distance (1 km) in the hiden face of the moon, in a well flat area and then fine tune their respective position with lasers for interferometry. A central lunokod would receive the light beams and combine them for interferometric observation. (There is an article in 'Astronomy' about interferometry). And that's it, not moonquake, no atmosphere, no parasite lights for hundreds of years !
For the landing, I don't see any reason why it should be more difficult than a regular landing of a Lunokod or an apollo capsule. That has been done 30 years ago, I wish it could be done for more cheeaper today. But no human please, keep it simple and cheap. The advandage of an automatic rover (a lunokod): it could move and adjust precisely the posture of its pibbyback telescope respective to the other rovers.
A 2 km wide interferometer, even with small telescope like that, could probably see extrasolar planets, in the IR, or in the visible with that "nulling" interferometric technique. Maybe one Ariane5 or Atlas5 could lift several lunokods like that in a single launch.
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*I'm not familiar with "interferometry/interferometers." I can break the word down: Interfere and -ometry/ometer (to measure). What exactly is it, and what is its purpose? Is it for relaying information?
I went back to the "What's the best telescope" thread, to be sure one of my previous (in that thread) questions hadn't already been answered: How will the telescope's data from the dark side of the moon be relayed to Earth? Apollo crews and Mission Control lost contact when they were passing over the dark side of the moon...(of course, the moon then being between the astronauts and Earth).
--Cindy
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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If it was an optical telescope, it needent necessarily be on the other side of the moon. It would simply need shielding from sunlight and earthshine and would be fine. Radio telescopes, need to be on the 'dark' side of the moon in order to be shielded from any radio transmission interference from the earth.
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A blast from the past when Nasa thought less about risk.
Scientists want to build telescopes on the moon for up to $10 billion to see more of the universe than the James Webb Space Telescope
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