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On Feb. 22, a lunar lander named Odysseus landed near the moon’s south pole and deployed four antennas to record radio waves around the surface — a moment that University of Colorado Boulder astrophysicist Jack Burns hailed as “the dawn of radio astronomy from the moon.”

It was a major achievement for the stubborn lander, which was built by Houston-based Intuitive Machines and had to overcome a series of technical difficulties to reach the lunar surface. Burns is a co-investigator of the radio experiment that flew aboard Odyssey called Radio Wave Observations of the Lunar Surface Photoelectron Envelope (ROLSES).

He will provide an update on the ROLSES data and share what lies ahead for future radio astronomy from the Moon this week at the 244th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Madison, Wisconsin.

“It was heroic for Intuitive Machines to land in those conditions and deploy our antennas, get some data and bring that data back to Earth,” said Burns, professor emeritus in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at CU Boulder.

Natchimuthuk Gopalswamy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, led the ROLSES experiment. The instrument, which includes antennas and a device called a radio spectrometer, is designed to record a wide range of radio emissions near the Moon and deep in space.

Despite the challenges of the mission, ROLSES was able to see Earth in a unique way.

“We looked at Earth as an exoplanet, or a planet orbiting another star,” Burns said. “This allows us to ask: What would our radio emissions from Earth look like if they came from an alien civilization on a nearby exoplanet?”

Earth selfie

Odysseus traveled to the Moon as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Utility Services (CLPS) program, an ambitious effort to land spacecraft built by private companies on the lunar surface. It was the first such mission to achieve what NASA calls a “soft landing,” although it tilted to one side in the process.

But it almost didn’t happen. Among other challenges, Odysseus was unable to use its laser-guided navigation system to land on the moon’s rocky surface. Instead, operators at Intuitive Machines relied entirely on the lander’s optical camera—an impressive maneuvering feat.

While Odyssey was traveling to the Moon, one of the ROLSES antennas overheated slightly and popped out of its housing on the lander. (A selfie from the spaceship shows the antenna sticking out into space). It turned out to be luck, Burns said.

The team used the incident to look back at Earth and record radio waves emitted by the planet for nearly an hour and a half. Human technology, including cell phones and broadcast towers, emits radio radiation almost constantly. Astronomer Carl Sagan led a similar experiment from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the 1990s, but the ROLSES data were more comprehensive.

Burns noted that scientists may be able to look for similar fingerprints coming from planets far from our own — a potential sign of intelligent life.

Moonrise

He and his colleagues are just getting started. NASA has already given the go-ahead for a second ROLSES experiment, which will fly on another CLPS lander, possibly in 2026.

The astrophysicist is also part of a third CLPS experiment, known as the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night), scheduled to arrive on the moon in 2026. The instrument will land on the far side of the moon, a quiet place that human radio emissions cannot reach . From there, it will observe radio emissions coming not from Earth, but from the earliest days of the universe before the first stars formed, called the Dark Ages – shedding more light on how the cosmos evolved during this crucial juncture in its history.

“Because NASA will send two or three landers to the Moon each year, we have a way to build on our instruments and learn from what goes wrong in a way that we haven’t been able to do since the early days of the space program.” Burns said.