Blue Skies Space, a British company, is designing a constellation of satellites for the Italian Space Agency. These satellites, potentially four or more, aim to detect faint radio signals from the early universe, a feat difficult from Earth due to interference. The project's design phase is funded at €200,000.
The satellites will target radio signals in the FM range, dating back to less than a million years after the Big Bang. These signals could provide insights into the universe before star formation. The far side of the moon offers a shielded environment ideal for detecting these faint signals.
The proposed design uses CubeSats with commercial components. Integration with the European Space Agency's Moonlight program is envisioned, leveraging its planned lunar orbital satellite constellation for positioning and data transmission.
NASA's previous lunar radio telescope missions, ROLSES-1 and the upcoming LuSEE-Lite, are cited. NASA also has long-term plans for a much larger lunar crater radio telescope.
A British space company is designing a fleet of satellites that could orbit the moon and map the early universe.
The Italian Space Agency has commissioned Blue Skies Space to design the satellites that could detect faint radio signals from the dawn of the universe. These signals are almost impossible to detect from Earth’s surface due to human-made radio interference, but the far side of the moon is shielded from this noise.
Dr Marcell Tessenyi, the chief executive of Blue Skies Space, said: “We want to be able to peek into those dark ages and get knowledge of large-scale structures of the early universe. Doing this from the Earth’s surface is very difficult.”
The Italian Space Agency has commissioned the €200,000 design project to uncover whether a fleet of four or more satellites could detect these radio signals, which sit in the FM radio range. The signatures, dating to less than a million years after the big bang, could give insights into a time before the first stars formed when the universe was mostly hydrogen gas.
The lunar far side, where the moon blocks interference from Earth, is seen as an ideal location for detecting these signals.
Nasa has made the first successful use of a radio telescope on the moon. Its ROLSES-1 (Radio wave Observations at the Lunar Surface of the photoElectron Sheath) telescope was mounted on the Odysseus lander, an Intuitive Machines spacecraft that tipped on its side after landing last year. Some of its equipment malfunctioned but the telescope survived.
Nasa plans to launch LuSEE-Lite, a small radio telescope that will be positioned on the lunar far side, later this year. There are also ambitions to build an enormous radio telescope on the moon by using robots to drape a wire mesh across the inside of a lunar crater.
Blue Skies has proposed the use of simple CubeSats, equipped with commercial off-the-shelf components, that could orbit the moon and be integrated into the European Space Agency’s Moonlight programme, which plans to create a constellation of satellites in lunar orbit for communications and navigation.
Blue Skies is hoping that this planned infrastructure could be used to ensure the correct positioning of the astronomy observation satellites and enable data to be beamed back to Earth.
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