Just when people believed there were enough satellites in space, China announced plans to launch a satellite constellation orbiting the moon in an attempt to probe the early days of the universe as early as 2026.
According to Space.comone “mother” satellite and eight small “daughter” craft will make up the array.
According to Xuelei Chen, an astronomer with the China National Space Administration (CNSA), at the Astronomy From the Moon conference held earlier this year in London, the mother will process information and communicate with Earth, and the daughters will detect radio signals from the farthest reaches. of space.
It would be technically more feasible to put such an array into orbit around the moon than to raise a telescope on the moon’s surface, which NASA and other space agencies consider one of the next big steps in astronomy.
“There are a number of advantages to doing this in orbit instead of on the surface because it’s engineering much simpler,” Chen said during the conference.
He added that solar energy could be used to observe the lunar night because the lunar orbital period is two hours, making it easier than providing power for 14 days on the lunar surface.
“There’s no need to land and deploy, and also because the lunar orbital period is two hours, we can use solar energy, which is much easier than doing it on the lunar surface, which if you want to observe during the lunar night, then you should provide energy for almost 14 days.”
He also said that this proposed Longest Wavelength Sky Discovery, or Hongmeng Project, could be ready as early as 2026.
Astronomers are interested in the low-frequency part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is impossible to study from the Earth’s surface due to strong absorption by the Earth’s atmosphere.
They believe this radiation may allow them to peer into the Dark Ages, when the universe was full of hydrogen atoms and their light could not penetrate using a lunar telescope.