ASA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) are collaborating on the LuSEE-Night project. The project plans to set up a radio telescope on the moon to help scientists peer into the ancient past of the universe and unveil the “Dark Ages of the Universe”.
Paul O’Connor, Anže Slosar and Sven Herrmann (left to right) develop the LuSEE-Night project in Brookhaven’s instrumentation lab.
The “Dark Ages” refers to the first stars and galaxies that appeared in the vastness of the universe between about 380,000 and 400 million years after the Big Bang.
LuSEE-Night is a fascinating experiment that will bring us closer to observing something we have never been able to observe before, the Dark Age signal,” said Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. With this collaboration, DOE and NASA are setting the stage for successful exploration of Dark Age cosmology in the decades ahead.”
Source: NASA
LuSEE-Night is expected to be launched to the far side of the Moon in 2025 under the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) project, and will be the first to measure sensitive radio wave signals using a deployable antenna and radio receiver in the nighttime lunar environment.
Credit: Stuart Bale, University of California, Berkeley
