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NASA Reveals Wild Project For Turning a Moon Crater Into a Radio Telescope
NASA just gave out a new round of grants for its favourite up and coming innovative space projects – one of which is a plan to fit a 1 kilometre (3,281 foot) radio telescope inside a crater on the far side of the Moon.
The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) would be able to measure wavelengths and frequencies that can't be detected from Earth, working unobstructed by the ionosphere or the various other bits of radio noise surrounding our planet.
Should the plans for the LCRT become a reality – and the new grant money could get it closer to that – it would be the largest filled-aperture radio telescope in the Solar System.
Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) on the Far-Side of the Moon
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2020, @08:54PM
While parabolic reflectors don't suffer from spherical aberration, they have disadvantages of their own. A parabolic reflector suffiers from varying error if the receiver is moved -- as such they normally use receivers which are fixed relative to the reflector (often at the parabola's focal point with minimum astigmatism).
This works fine if you can orient the telescope to point towards the thing you are looking at but with huge single-aperture telescopes like this moving the telescope itself is completely impractical. So such telescopes invariably use spherical reflectors with a movable receiver, as the spherical aberration is independent of the receiver position and can be corrected.