FarView Observatory – A Large, In-Situ Manufactured, Lunar Far Side Radio Array
From NASA: FarView is a low frequency (5-40 MHz) radio telescope array comprised of 100,000 dipole antennas, dispersed over ~ 200 km2. The observatory is manufactured in-situ, utilizing Lunar Resources’ developed technologies that first extract metals (along with oxygen) from lunar regolith then manufacture most of the required elements of the observatory: dipole antennas, solar cells, power lines, from those materials. FarView will be built on the lunar far side to shield it from the Earth’s ionospheric and anthropomorphic radio interference that compromise these observations from being made on Earth.
Significant advancements were made during the Phase I study. We adopted a subarray architecture rather than the single, fully connected array suggested in the Phase I proposal. The new subarray architecture made it relatively easy to identify potential build sites on the lunar far side. The region between 20 and 60 S latitude and 120 and 220 E longitude was found to be particularly rich in suitable sites. The science case for FarView was further developed with an emphasis on the unique capabilities to probe the unexplored Cosmic Dark Ages using interferometric radio observations. We were able to illustrate the potential for FarView to deliver a tomographic map tracing the evolution of the Universe from before the birth of the first stars to the beginning of reionization.