‘Lunar gold rush’ on dark side of the moon
There is a place in the solar system where you will never pick up EastEnders. Here, however big your antenna, your Twitter/X feed will never update on 4G, and you will never be able to catch up on The Archers. All the noise and chatter of the Earth is lost in trillions of tonnes of rock.
This place, the quietest place in the solar system, is also one of the closest: the far side of the moon. And radio astronomers – who hope very much to put a telescope there – are worried that time is running out to ensure it stays quiet.
They are not the only ones concerned. Astrobiologists want to use water deposited over billions of years at the lunar poles to understand the organic molecules that bombarded earth – and perhaps seeded life. Yet they also know that Nasa described the same deposits as a key resource in a new “lunar gold rush”, a key resource to be mined for rocket fuel.
Then there are others who simply worry that humans are about to do on the moon what they have already done to the Earth: desecrate it.
“This is really an urgent matter,” said Claudio Maccone, from the International Academy of Astronautics.
He is convening a conference in Turin, Italy, this month to discuss the far side of the moon, with the hope of creating a treaty to limit radio interference. He knows there is a short window to do so.
In 2019, the Chinese put a lander on the far side of the moon. Last summer, India put a lander by the south pole. In January, Japan landed its own craft. Late last month, a private company, Intuitive Machines, had a partially successful landing.
Nasa, meanwhile, has said it intends to get humans to the moon this decade – followed by a permanently crewed lunar base, serviced by a small fleet of satellites. After a 50-year hiatus, humanity is returning to the moon, and this time it intends to stay.
For Maccone, this is good news – without a moon base there will be no way to build telescopes. But it also comes with risks.
The moon is tidally locked to the Earth, meaning that one side of it is always facing away. In all human history, just 24 men have seen it. The first, the Apollo astronaut William Anders, didn’t think humanity had missed much. “It’s all beat up, no definition, just a lot of bumps,” he told Houston.
Radio astronomers beg to differ. They see the far side of the moon as the future for their field. “The transmissions from Earth are constantly increasing,” said Maccone. “And to do research from Earth is increasingly difficult.”
A telescope built here would provide better resolution radio astronomy, helping to learn more about the universe, to better track objects that might hit the Earth, and to potentially pick up weak signals from alien civilisations, he said.
But if a permanent presence on the moon is to be achieved, it needs infrastructure. It needs satellites that can provide navigation and relay messages, but unless they do so in a restricted bandwidth they will interfere with any telescopes. It needs rovers that may create radio interference. Most of all, it needs co-operation.
Ian Crawford, an astrobiologist at the University of Birkbeck, thinks we need to develop a system of moon governance – so that, for instance, some of the craters that contain liquid water are permanently set aside for science. “Just as we have national parks on the Earth where we try to preserve things more or less, you could imagine set aside parts of the moon.”
We should, he suggests, declare the far side of the moon to be the solar system’s first “Planetary Park”. - The Times