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Unbelievably Large Telescopes On the Moon?
Matt_dk writes "A team of internationally renowned astronomers and opticians may have found a way to make "unbelievably large" telescopes on the Moon.
'It's so simple,' says Ermanno F. Borra, physics professor at the Optics Laboratory of Laval University in Quebec, Canada. 'Isaac Newton knew that any liquid, if put into a shallow container and set spinning, naturally assumes a parabolic shape, the same shape needed by a telescope mirror to bring starlight to a focus. This could be the key to making a giant lunar observatory.'"
Actually, it just seems large because the moon looks so small. My guess is you're holding the telescope the wrong way round.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We have. This "news" is literally decades old.
http://www.google.com/search?q=liquid+telescope+moon&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS264US264
http://inventorspot.com/articles/liquid_lunar_telescope_5345 That one says that it was first suggested in 1991. I bet someone thought of it earlier.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The article implied that they have been thinking about this for years.
The difference is now they think they may have a liquid they can use - ionic liquids. On earth they use Mercury as the liquid but that is too heavy to lift to space and it will evaporate. Also the costs involved are now demonstrating it is viable for lunar use.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
You just build a big tube. Like a giant internet that goes to the moon.
Maybe not
This is total lunacy!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
The so-called "dark side of the moon" does not refer to the lack of sunlight or nighttime conditions. All parts of the moon go through the same kind of night/day cycle that the Earth does, only 29.53x slower.
The phrase refers to radio darkness. The moon spins at the same rate it orbits the Earth, so the same familiar craters are always facing us. Anyone standing amongst those craters is being bombarded by the radio noise chatter of the whole Earth population. Anyone standing on the opposite side of the moon can pick up none of that.
One potential problem with setting up bases on the dark side is how to communicate with them. To maintain the radio silence, you can't just stick a radio-based communication moon-satellite out there. It would be very expensive to maintain a cable or laser hookup for any significant distance along the moon surface. So you're left with small windows of time you can communicate, or you work on a focused laser-based comm link with a moon-satellite. That reminds me... what's the "geosynchronous" radius for moon-satellites?
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The "liquids" to be used are less dense than water, and being placed on the lunar surface, which is covered in dust several times finer than baking powder.
I'd give it about 3-5 days (depending on the size) before the "revolving liquid mirrors" become revolving lunar mud pies.
How? Is the wind is going to blow the dust onto the mirror??
we don't have to transport massive amounts of equipment to the dark side of the moon.
It's FAR SIDE people! Far Side, Far Side, Far Side. Like the cartoon. The Moon is tidally locked to Earth, so there's a Near side and a Far Side. If it were tidally locked to the Sun, then you'd have a light side and a dark side. But it's not, so we don't. There is no dark side of the moon, except for the ever changing half that's facing away from the sun at the moment.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Stick at relay satellite at the Earth-Moon L4 or L5. That means the telescope couldn't be exactly opposite Earth, but if there's still a lot of room where it's shielded from Earth but still in view of L4 or L5.
A lot.
The mass of the moon is ~7*10^22 kg (70 billion trillion kg). The mass of the Saturn V rocket is about 3 million kg. If we sent up a Saturn V rocket for every man, woman, and child on the planet, we wouldn't even be close to an appreciable fraction of a percent of the moon's mass. And even if we were, it is a stable system so there wouldn't be any significant effect.
Look, I don't care who you work for sonny, you are not flying with more than 100ml of liquid in your luggage, so hand it over. Bloody astronauts think they are so superior.
Home fucking is killing prostitution.
...at the sun's gravitational focus. You'd be able to resolve a planet halfway across the galaxy.
First link I pulled from Google (but there are several others): http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=176