By PETER SUR By PETER SUR ADVERTISING Tribune-Herald staff writer The International Lunar Observatory Association, an ambitious Waimea nonprofit that has plans to plant a telescope on the moon, is taking a big step forward on Tuesday with the signing
By PETER SUR
Tribune-Herald staff writer
The International Lunar Observatory Association, an ambitious Waimea nonprofit that has plans to plant a telescope on the moon, is taking a big step forward on Tuesday with the signing of an agreement with the Chinese space agency.
In recent years, the ILOA has been taking small, quiet steps toward its ultimate goal. This week, the group will invite a delegation of dignitaries and scientists from China’s National Astronomical Observatories to its headquarters in Waimea.
The meeting is being held in advance of next year’s moon landing — the first soft lunar landing since 1976 — of China’s Chang’e-3 moon lander and rover. The lander will have a 6-inch diameter telescope that will take images in the ultraviolet wavelengths.
The agreement will allow the ILOA-sponsored Galaxy Forum program to use images of the core of the Milky Way from the telescope in local classrooms. In exchange, the Chinese will be able to reserve time on two of ILOA’s own space-bound telescopes when they arrive on the moon, perhaps in 2014 or 2015, depending on the availability of funding.
One of the precursors to the telescope is ILO-X, a shoebox-sized, 4.4-pound imaging instrument that will hitch a ride to the moon on the Moon Express, one of the competitors for the Google Lunar X Prize, which will award $30 million to the first team to place a privately funded robot on the moon. ILO-X could be sending back images by 2014.
In July, ILO-X demonstrated its imaging capabilities on Mauna Kea in an event hosted by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope.
All of this is a precursor to ILO-1, a plan to put a 2-meter telescope on the south polar region of the moon and establish a permanent communications post for spacecraft and future human missions.
“We are pursuing astronomy from the moon,” said founding director Steve Durst.
Today, there are two kinds of telescopes — ground-based and orbiting.
Ground-based astronomy, as practiced on Mauna Kea and various mountains in Chile, the Canary Islands and elsewhere around the world, allows for giant telescopes with huge mirrors that can collect faint light from across the universe, but their resolution is limited by the blurring effects of the atmosphere, which also shields large sections of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Orbiting telescopes, like the Hubble Space Telescope, don’t have to contend with an atmosphere, which makes for better images. On the other hand, these telescopes have to be robust enough to operate for years without human intervention, the cost of operating them is astronomical and their low Earth orbit limits the amount of time it can observe an object.
But putting a telescope on the moon, if the engineering challenges can be worked out, will combine some of the advantages of both ground-based and orbiting telescopes.
“We’ll be observing the stars as well as other lunar activities,” Durst said. He added that “there are a lot of studies over the last 4o or 50 years that have shown that observing from the moon has enormous advantages.”
Email Peter Sur at psur@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
