Photo credit: Vladimir Vustyansky
NASA has a bold plan to plant a massive radio telescope in a lunar crater, a project that could redefine how we listen to the universe’s deepest secrets. Dubbed the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT), this isn’t just another space gadget—it’s a 1-kilometer-wide wire mesh dish designed to capture whispers from the cosmos that Earth’s noisy atmosphere and satellites drown out. If approved, it could be operational by the 2030s, built entirely by robots in a pristine, radio-quiet zone on the moon’s far side.
The moon’s far side—often misnamed the “dark side,” though it gets just as much sunlight as the near side—is a cosmic sanctuary. It’s shielded from Earth’s radio chatter, including the growing din from satellite megaconstellations like SpaceX’s Starlink. “Private satellites, such as SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, leak radio waves that interfere with ground-based observations. And the problem is only going to get worse,” says Federico Di Vruno, an astronomer at the Square Kilometer Array Observatory. The LCRT would sit in a 3- to 5-kilometer-wide crater, its wire mesh suspended like a giant spiderweb, catching signals that Earth’s atmosphere blocks—specifically, ultra-long-wavelength radio waves longer than 10 meters.
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Why these wavelengths? They’re a time machine. The universe’s “Cosmic Dark Ages,” a period roughly 380,000 to 400 million years after the Big Bang, was a time before stars or galaxies existed—just neutral hydrogen, photons, and dark matter floating in a vast, dark void. “During this phase, the universe primarily consisted of neutral hydrogen, photons, and dark matter, thus it serves as an excellent laboratory for testing our understanding of cosmology,” says Gaurangi Gupta, a lead scientist on the LCRT team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The plan involves NASA’s DuAxel robots—think rugged, wall-climbing rovers that split into two parts to tackle tough terrain. These bots would descend into a lunar crater, hauling a lightweight aluminum mesh to form a 1,150-foot-wide dish. “LCRT could enable tremendous scientific discoveries in the field of cosmology by observing the early universe in the 10–50m wavelength band, which has not been explored by humans till-date,” says Saptarshi Bandyopadhyay, the project’s lead at JPL. The mesh needs to be durable yet flexible, surviving temperature swings from 250°F to -280°F. One idea being explored is using harpoons to anchor the mesh, though that could take months and requires surviving lunar nights.
The latest estimate pegs the LCRT at $2.6 billion, a hefty sum in NASA’s budget-constrained world. This isn’t the first time scientists have dreamed of a lunar telescope—proposals date back to 1984—but past ideas stalled due to technical challenges. “But with state-of-the-art technology, LCRT can potentially solve all these issues and make this concept a reality,” Gupta says. NASA’s already testing the waters with smaller projects, like the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment-Night (LuSEE-Night), a mini radio telescope set to land on the moon’s far side via Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost II in 2025. LuSEE-Night will scan for those same ultra-long-wavelength signals, proving whether the moon’s far side can indeed be a radio-quiet haven.
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