By IANS,
Washington : NASA scientists will fabricate the biggest ever telescopes on the lunar surface with a mixture of carbon and plenty of moon dust.
“We could make huge telescopes on the moon relatively easily, and avoid the large expense of transporting a large mirror from Earth,” said Peter Chen of NASA.
“Since most of the materials are already there in the form of dust, you don’t have to bring very much stuff with you, and that saves a ton of money.”
For years, Chen had been working with carbon-fibre composite materials to produce prime telescope mirrors. But then he substituted carbon nano-tubes – or tubular structures of pure carbon – for carbon-fibre composites.
When they mixed small amounts of carbon nanotubes and epoxy – a glue-like material – with crushed rock with the same composition size as lunar dust, they found they had created a very strong concrete-like material. This material can be used instead of glass to make mirrors.
They next applied additional layers of epoxy and spun the material at room temperature. The result was a 12-inch-wide mirror blank with the parabolic shape of a telescope mirror.
“After that, all we needed to do was coat the mirror blank with a small amount of aluminium and voilà, we had a highly reflective telescope mirror,” said fellow NASA scientist Douglas Rabin.
“Our method could be scaled-up on the moon, using the ubiquitous lunar dust, to create giant telescope mirrors up to 50 metres in diameter.”
Such an observatory would dwarf the world’s largest optical telescope, the 10.4-metre Gran Telescopio Canarias in the Canary Islands.
The capabilities of a 50-metre telescope on the Moon boggle the imagination. Two or more such telescopes can work together to take direct images of Earth-like planets around nearby stars and look for brightness variations from oceans and continents.
Chen will be presenting his findings Friday at the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis.