Human technology such as cell phones and broadcast towers are constantly emitting radio waves spaceand astronomers believe that this telltale signature of humanity has passed everywhere 75 nearby star systems, signaling to any vigilant alien civilization that Earth is host to a technologically advanced species. And while scientists have been listening to the continuous radio chatter from our planet for a long time, in late February they heard it from the moon for the first time time.
A small radio telescope aboard the Odysseus spacecraft, the first commercial vehicle that successfully landed on the moon on February 22 recorded radio waves radiate from The Earth for 1.5 hours. The experiment, called ROLSES, made its observations from the Odyssey landing site near the Malapert A crater, which is approximately 185 miles (297 kilometers) away. away from the moonthe south pole.
Astrophysicist Jack Burns of the University of Colorado Boulder, who is a co-investigator of ROLSES, describes the moment as “the dawn of radio astronomy from the Moon.” Studying the Earth as exoplanetastronomers hope to look for similar fingerprints coming from planets around others starswhich would be a potential sign of intelligent life.
Speaking Monday (June 10) at the 244th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Wisconsin, Burns pulled up an image on the screen in which tiny white dots appeared scattered over a black background, forming mostly horizontal lines. “This is Earth,” he said.
The white spots are radio signals from transmitters on Earth recorded by the four antennas of the ROLSES experiment. It’s a “really good ‘frequency selfie’ of Earth.” […] it’s unprecedented” in terms of looking at Earth in radio waves, Burns added.
Connected: Intuitive Machines’ private Odysseus lander ‘faded forever’ on lunar surface after historic mission ends
During its historic landing on February 22, the 14-foot (4.3-meter) Odysseus spacecraft descended faster than planned and flipped onto its side, possibly because broken one or two of its landing legs after impacting some of the lunar terrain, Tim Crane, Intuitive Machines co-founder and CTO, said earlier. As a result of this unexpected orientation, the spacecraft’s antennas were not pointed back at Earth, greatly reducing the rate at which data could be sent.
Perhaps because of these problems, the ROLSES instrument recorded a total of two hours of data instead of the eight days astronomers had hoped for, Burns said Monday. The reduced time would affect the signal-to-noise ratio of the data collected, he added. It was not immediately clear whether researchers would be able to decode the transmissions to determine the content of those radio waves.
The researchers also collected an occasional 20 minutes of data when one of Odyssey’s antennas overheated slightly and popped out of its secure location on the lander. “So we took advantage of that, turned on our radio spectrometer and got some data,” Burns said.
After a week of operations on The moon, Odyssey went silent on February 29 after sunset hit the landing site, which was expected given that the spacecraft was not designed to survive the cold lunar night. When sunlight again shone on Odyssey’s solar panels on March 20, Intuitive machines, the Houston-based company that built the spacecraft, listened but failed to hear his wake-up call. Three days later the company declared “Odie faded forever after cementing its legacy in history as the first commercial lunar lander to land on the moon.”
Astronomers, including Burns, are now awaiting the launch of another small radio telescope, which is expected to be launched to the far side of the Moon in 2026. The Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night, or LuSEE-Night for short, is designed to detect radio waves from 13.4 billion years ago years, a mysterious age when The universe and its first stars and galaxies were enveloped in a primordial haze of hydrogen. Astronomers call this epoch cosmic dark ageswhich of James Webb Space Telescope only recently started research.
