Isolation dictates where we go to see into the far reaches of the universe. The Atacama Desert of Chile, the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the vast expanse of the Australian Outback—these are where astronomers and engineers have built the great observatories and radio telescopes of modern times. The skies are usually clear, the air is arid, and the electronic din of civilization is far away.
It was to one of these places, in the high desert of New Mexico, that a young astronomer named Jack Burns went to study radio jets and quasars far beyond the Milky Way. It was 1979, he was just out of grad school, and the Very Large Array, a constellation of 28 giant dish antennas on an open plain, was a new mecca of radio astronomy.
But the VLA had its limitations—namely, that Earth’s protective atmosphere and ionosphere blocked many parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and that, even in a remote desert, earthly interference was never completely gone.
Could there be a better, even lonelier place to put a radio telescope? Sure, a NASA planetary scientist named Wendell Mendell, told Burns: How about the moon? He asked if Burns had ever thought about building one there.
“My immediate reaction was no. Maybe even hell, no. Why would I want to do that?” Burns recalls with a self-deprecating smile. His work at the VLA had gone well, he was fascinated by cosmology’s big questions, and he didn’t want to be slowed by the bureaucratic slog of getting funding to launch a new piece of hardware.
But Mendell suggested he do some research and speak at a conference on future lunar observatories, and Burns’s thinking about a space-based radio telescope began to shift. That was in 1984. In the four decades since, he’s published more than 500 peer-reviewed papers on radio astronomy. He’s been an adviser to NASA, the Department of Energy, and the White House, as well as a professor and a university administrator. And while doing all that, Burns has had an ongoing second job of sorts, as a quietly persistent advocate for radio astronomy from space.
And early next year, if all goes well, a radio telescope for which he’s a scientific investigator will be launched—not just into space, not just to the moon, but to the moon’s far side, where it will observe things invisible from Earth.
“You can see we don’t lack for ambition after all these years,” says Burns, now 73 and a professor emeritus of astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The instrument is called LuSEE-Night, short for Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment–Night. It will be launched from Florida aboard a SpaceX rocket and carried to the moon’s far side atop a squat four-legged robotic spacecraft called Blue Ghost Mission 2, built and operated by Firefly Aerospace of Cedar Park, Texas.
In an artist’s rendering, the LuSEE-Night radio telescope sits atop Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 2 lander, which will carry it to the moon’s far side. Firefly Aerospace
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