Organization | EADS Astrium Space Transportation |
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Location | The far side of the Moon |
![]() | This article needs to be updated.(January 2012) |
The Lunar Infrastructure for Exploration (LIFE) was a proposed project to build a space telescope on the far side of the Moon, actively promoted by EADS Astrium Space Transportation of Germany and the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy ASTRON/LOFAR. The project was presented for the first time publicly at the 2005 IAF Congress in Fukuoka. [ citation needed ]
The 1.3 billion euro project would have involved a radio telescope to be located on the polar region of the far side of the Moon.
The radio telescope was intended to look for exoplanets and detect signals in the 1-10 MHz range. Such signals cannot be detected on Earth because of ionosphere interference.
The proposed telescope would have been constructed by a lander vehicle to deploy dipoles across a 300-400 m area. The dipoles, which receive the cosmic radio signals, would be deployed either by a dispenser or by a team of small mobile robots. The telescope would have been located near the South Pole to ensure permanent sunlight and direct communication with Earth. The proposed lander would also have had geophones, which could listen to meteorite impacts on the Moon's surface.
Another German aerospace consortium, OHB-System, also promoted a lunar lander concept called Mona Lisa. [1] Models of both concepts were displayed at ILA in 2006.
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Daedalus is a prominent crater located near the center of the far side of the Moon. The inner wall is terraced, and there is a cluster of central peaks on the relatively flat floor. Because of its location, it has been proposed as the site of a future giant radio telescope, which would be scooped out of the crater itself, much like the Arecibo radio telescope, but on a vastly larger scale.
The far side of the Moon is the lunar hemisphere that always faces away from Earth, opposite to the near side, because of synchronous rotation in the Moon's orbit. Compared to the near side, the far side's terrain is rugged, with a multitude of impact craters and relatively few flat and dark lunar maria ("seas"), giving it an appearance closer to other barren places in the Solar System such as Mercury and Callisto. It has one of the largest craters in the Solar System, the South Pole–Aitken basin. The hemisphere has sometimes been called the "dark side of the Moon", where "dark" means "unknown" instead of "lacking sunlight" – each location on the Moon experiences two weeks of sunlight while the opposite location experiences night.
The Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR) is a large radio telescope, with an antenna network located mainly in the Netherlands, and spreading across 7 other European countries as of 2019. Originally designed and built by ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, it was first opened by Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands in 2010, and has since been operated on behalf of the International LOFAR Telescope (ILT) partnership by ASTRON.
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