(ORDO NEWS) — Everyone loves taking pictures of the moon. Whether it’s from their phones or through the wonders of astrophotography, photographing the moon reminds us of the wonders and awesomeness of the universe.
But while we can take stunning pictures of the entire Moon from Earth, it’s extremely difficult to get close-up images of its surface, given the huge distance we’re from our closest celestial neighbor at 384,400 km (238,855 miles).
This is because the closer we try to enlarge its surface, the blurrier or more pixelated images become. Basically, image resolution is getting worse and worse.
But what if we could take high-resolution pictures of the Moon’s surface from Earth, instead of relying on the satellites currently in lunar orbit to take them for us?
Obtaining high-resolution images from Earth is exactly what a collaborative team of scientists and engineers from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), Green Bank Observatory (GBO) and Raytheon Intelligence & Space (RIS) are doing.
Intended to be done with the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline (VLBA) array.
Through their efforts, GBT, currently the world‘s largest fully steerable radio telescope, could be home to a powerful next-generation planetary radar system that scientists can use to study planets, moons, and even asteroids in our own solar system.
The radar prototype consists of a low power transmitter developed by RIS, tested using GBT, and a target d on the lunar surface with the radar signals reflected and received by ten 25m VLBA NRAO antennas.
What is most notable about the transmitter is that it only produced up to 700 watts of power, less than a standard 800-1000 watt kitchen microwave at 13.9 GHz.
The radar prototype was able to image Tycho crater, located in the southern hemisphere of the Moon, with a diameter of about 85 kilometers, with a resolution of 5 meters, revealing incredible details of the crater floor.
“It’s amazing what we’ve been able to capture so far using less power than a typical household appliance,” Patrick Taylor, one of the heads of the radar department. for GBO and NRAO, the statement said.
Taylor presented the results of the prototype radar at the 241st American Astronomical Society st Conference in Seattle, Washington, January 2023, in a short talk titled Next Generation Planetary Radar on the Green Bank Telescope , where he showed radar images of the lunar surface and other finds between 2020 and 2021 and can be seen in the first ten minutes of the video below.
Taylor described the images of Tycho crater in his talk as “…kind of line or polygon features on the bottom of the crater, just to show that you can start doing geology with these ground [Earth] images.”
He also showed one radar image of the Apollo 15 landing site at an astounding 1.25 meters resolution, which he called “the highest resolution image of the Moon ever taken from the earth.”
For context, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LROC) camera aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) can take images of the Moon’s surface down to 0.5-meter resolution, which means this prototype radar can image the Moon’s surface from Earth in much the same way. like a satellite that is currently orbiting the moon itself!
Along with lunar images, the radar prototype also detected a “potentially hazardous” asteroid known as (231937) 2001 FO32 in 2021, which is labeled as “potentially hazardous” due to its size, approximately 1 kilometer in diameter, and how close he can come to the earth, in this case just over 2 million kilometers.
The discovery of the asteroid came as a spike in their data. “And now it’s not the same as images of the Moon,” Taylor said in his speech.
“But from this little spike, you can understand how fast this object is moving, you can calculate its orbit, you can calculate its trajectory in the future, you can determine the risk of it colliding, you can estimate how dangerous it is, you can limit it. spin state, its size, its composition, its scattering properties, and so on.
“So, even if it doesn’t look like much, one little discovery can tell you a lot. information about the characteristics of the asteroid. So the main takeaway from this is that we were able to detect an asteroid five times further away than the Moon with less power than your microwave, which is pretty impressive.”
The next steps include increasing the radar’s power to 500 kilowatts, nearly 1,000 times more powerful than the current 700-watt prototype. both VLBA and the upcoming Next Generation Very Large Array (ngVLA) are currently used as ground receivers.
This radar also has the potential to detect objects in so-called cislunar space, also known as high Earth orbit space, in hopes of protecting future lunar astronauts and spacecraft when we send humans back to the Moon in the coming years.
In addition to its potential planetary defense capabilities, the future GBO radar system could also be used for planetary science purposes, including imaging, astrometry, and the physical and dynamic characterization of solar system planetary objects.
What exciting discoveries will the new GBO radar system make regarding our solar system in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and that’s why we do science!
As always, keep doing the science and keep looking!
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