Lunar DIY Telescopes

Scientists working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have developed plans for giant telescope mirrors on the Moon using lunar dust.

The capabilities of a 50-meter telescope on the Moon stagger the imagination, according to NASA. With a stable platform, and no atmosphere to absorb or blur starlight, the monster scope could record the spectra of extra solar terrestrial planets and detect atmospheric biomarkers such as ozone and methane. Two or more such telescopes spanning the surface of the Moon can work together to take direct images of Earth-like planets around nearby stars and look for brightness variations that come from oceans and continents.

“We could make huge telescopes on the moon relatively easily, and avoid the large expense of transporting a large mirror from Earth,” says Peter Chen of NASA Goddard and the Catholic University of America, which is located in Washington, D.C. “Since most of the materials are already there in the form of dust, you don’t have to bring very much stuff with you, and that saves a ton of money.”

For years, Chen had been working with carbon-fiber composite materials to produce high-quality telescope mirrors. But Chen and his colleagues tried an experiment substituting carbon nanotubes (tiny tubular structures made of pure carbon) for the carbon-fiber composites. When they mixed small amounts of carbon nanotubes and epoxies with crushed rock that has the same composition and grain size as lunar dust, they discovered that they had created a material with the consistency of concrete that can substitute for glass traditionaly used to make mirrors.

They next applied additional layers of epoxy and spun the material at room temperature. The result was a 12-inch-wide mirror blank with the parabolic shape of a telescope mirror.

“After that, all we needed to do was coat the mirror blank with a small amount of aluminum, and voilà, we had a highly reflective telescope mirror,” says Rabin. “Our method could be scaled-up on the moon, using the ubiquitous lunar dust, to create giant telescope mirrors up to 50 meters in diameter.” Such an observatory would dwarf the largest optical telescope in the world right now: the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias in the Canary Islands.

“Constructing giant telescopes provides a strong rationale for doing astronomy from the moon,” says Chen. “We could also use this on-site composite material to build habitats for the astronauts, and mirrors to collect sunlight for solar-power farms.”

Posted by Casey Kazan. Adapted from a NASA release.

http://nanotechnologyfan.com/2008/06/05/giant-telescope-using-carbon-nanotubes/

Comments

[jer35mx]

Well, this note was in other site and there were discussions about the amount of time and resources that should be implemented first to start with the handcraft of this telescopes, that is, it's a good idea but in a many years.