A RADIO TELESCOPE ON THE MOON'S FAR SIDE WILL PEER INTO THE UNIVERSE'S 'DARK AGES'

The LuSEE-Night pathfinder is scheduled to launch a few years from now

- Josh Dinner

A small radio telescope on the far side of the Moon could help scientists peer into the universe’s ancient past. The Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night) is a pathfinder being developed by the US Department of Energy’s Brookhaven and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, the Space Science Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

LuSEE-Night is scheduled to launch on a private lunar lander in late 2025. After it touches down on the Moon’s far side, it will attempt to gather first-of-their-kind measurements from the Dark Ages of the universe. This refers to a time in the early universe before stars and galaxies began to fully form. From the far side of the Moon, LuSEE-Night will use onboard antennae, radio receivers and a spectrometer to measure faint radio waves from the Dark Ages in search of what scientists are calling the Dark Ages signal.