Scientists have taken a giant leap toward making possible the dream of building a powerful telescope on the moon that could withstand even the harshest of lunar conditions.
Writing in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature, they said they coated a special type of liquid surface with a layer of silver to make a highly reflective mirror like one that could be used in any future, moon-based telescope.
“It’s the breakthrough that we need,” lead researcher Ermanno Borra of Universite Laval in Quebec, Canada, said in a telephone interview. “If you want to have a liquid mirror telescope on the moon, you need the right liquid. If you don’t have the right liquid, forget it. It’s as simple as that.”
Borra envisions a telescope with a liquid mirror measuring 66 feet to 328 feet wide.
Such a telescope, which has drawn NASA’s interest, could provide astronomers on Earth unprecedented views into distant reaches of the universe, studying objects far more faint even than NASA’s planned James Webb Space Telescope, due for a 2013 launch.
Astronomers hope such an instrument could allow them to study the early phases of the universe after the Big Bang.
Progress made toward lunar liquid mirror telescope | Science | Reuters