Lunar Lens Takes A Step Forward

palewook writes "A recent breakthrough increased NASA's interest in a lunar-based space telescope. Researchers combined an ionic liquid surface and a layer of silver which produced a favorably reflective mirror."

Comments

Re:The interesting part

[Gerzel]

Hell the placement makes us drool as ANY functioning telescope data from the far side of the moon would probably give us new and tantalizing images.

Answer

[Ihlosi]

And what environmental factors could possible cause that on the moon, which has no atmosphere or tectonic activity?

Static electricity is one thing that keeps moving dust around on the moon. And then there's ejected material from meteor impacts (with gravity that low, stuff kicked up by meteors can travel quite far)

Re:A lunar telescope is cool and all but...

[jbrader]

Visible light interferometry is damned difficult because of the small wavelengths involved. Also, even though and interferometer gives you the same angular resolution as a similar sized single element telescope it doesn't give you the same sensitivity to faint objects because of the smaller overall surface area of the objective. Plus, really big telescopes are inherently cooler.

There's one in Canada already...

[AliasMarlowe]

UBC has a telescope whose primary reflector is a spinning liquid mercury mirror http://www.astro.ubc.ca/LMT. It forms a paraboloidal reflective surface, which is one of the optimal reflector shapes, but can only be aimed at the zenith. A larger (6m diameter) version is being constructed for installation at the same facility near Vancouver.

Smaller liquid-mirror telescopes were designed in the late 19th century, and a 51cm diameter example was built in the early 20th century (by Robert Wood) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Wood. Wood's design suffered from intermittent ripples on the surface, but performed well at other times.

At least Canada is closer than the Moon, and easier to get to (not necessarily less inhospitable, of course).