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Credit: CC0 Public Domain
On Feb. 22, a lunar lander named Odysseus landed near the moon’s south pole and deployed four antennas to record radio waves around the surface — a moment University of Colorado Boulder astrophysicist Jack Burns hails as “the dawn of lunar radio astronomy.” .”
It was quite an achievement for the tough lander, built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, and it had to overcome a number of technical difficulties to reach the lunar surface. Burns is co-investigator of the radio experiment that flew aboard Odyssey called Radio wave Observations at the Lunar Surface of photo Electron Sheath (ROLSES).
This week at the 244th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Madison, Wisconsin, he will provide an update on the ROLSES data and share what’s in store for future radio astronomy from the Moon.
“It was heroic for Intuitive Machines to land in those conditions and deploy our antennas, take some data and get it back to Earth,” said Burns, professor emeritus in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at CU Boulder.
Natchimuthuk Gopalswamy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, led the ROLSES experiment. The instrument, which included antennas and a device called a radio spectrometer, was designed to record a wide spectrum of radio emissions near the Moon and deep in space.
Despite the challenges of the mission, ROLSES managed to see Earth in a unique way.
“We looked at Earth as an exoplanet, or a planet orbiting another star,” Burns said. “This allows us to ask: What would our radio emissions from Earth look like if they came from an alien civilization from a nearby exoplanet?”
Earth selfie
Odysseus traveled to the Moon as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, an ambitious effort to land spacecraft built by private companies on the lunar surface. It was the first such mission to achieve what NASA calls a “soft landing,” though it tilted to its side in the process.
But it almost didn’t happen. Among other problems, Odysseus was unable to use his laser-guided navigation system to land on the rocky surface of the Moon. Instead, operators at Intuitive Machines relied solely on the lander’s optical camera system—an impressive maneuvering feat.
As Odysseus traveled to the moon, one of the ROLSES antennas overheated slightly and popped out of its housing on the lander. (Spaceship selfie shows antenna sticking out into space). It turned out to be luck, Burns said.
The team used the accident to look back at Earth and recorded radio waves emanating from the planet for nearly an hour and a half. Human technology, including cell phones and transmission towers, spews radio radiation almost constantly. Astronomer Carl Sagan led a similar experiment from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s, but the ROLSES data was exhaustive.
Burns noted that scientists may be able to look for similar fingerprints coming from planets far from our own — a potential sign of intelligent life.
Moon rise
He and his colleagues are just getting started. NASA has already given the go-ahead for a second ROLSES experiment, which will fly on another CLPS lander, likely in 2026.
The astrophysicist is also part of a third CLPS experiment, known as the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night), which is scheduled to arrive on the Moon in 2026. The instrument will land on the far side of the Moon, a quiet location beyond the reach of human radio emissions. From there, it will look at radio emissions originating not from Earth, but from the earliest days of the universe before the first stars formed, called the Dark Ages – shedding more light on how the universe evolved during this key juncture in its history.
“Because NASA will send two or three landers to the moon each year, we have a way to upgrade our instruments and learn from what went wrong in a way that we haven’t been able to do since the early days of the space program. Burns said.