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Too Soon To Doom Lunar Farside Observatories
Sure, progress is inevitable, and pretty soon we'll have factories and settlements on the last unspoiled nearby (for radio astronomers) territory - the spaceward lunar hemisphere aka the Farside. Or at least, that's what happens in science fiction in the year that I was born, in Dawn of the Demigods, by Raymond Z. Gallun, published by Planet Stories in 1954:
The region where we lived was called the spaceward lunar hemisphere. Earth never shone there, but life was good. There were other kids, and school, and the usual dreams about being a bold space wanderer, speeding out to find unimagined marvels.
Dad was a technician in the research labs, just a few miles from our house by tube train. I could see the walls of the buildings in the bleak volcanic distance.
Even though this future hasn't happened yet, radio astronomers are worried about it, at least according to Scientific American:
But an upcoming boom in lunar exploration could put that at risk. In the next ten years or so, the Moon will be the target of hundreds of orbiters and landers, each of which could create radio noise. Researchers voiced their concerns last month at a conference called Astronomy from the Moon: The Next Decades, which took place at the Royal Society in London.
“This is probably the most radio-quiet place in the Solar System, and we need to preserve that,” said Marc Klein Wolt, an astronomer at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
Take heart, radio astronomers, because as long as we're going full-on science fiction mode, we might as well get all the way to the edge of the Solar System:
"Sounds like fun,” said Maclaren. "I must try it sometime.”
"You . . .in your line of work . . . you must go to the Moon quite often,” said Ryerson shyly.
Maclaren nodded. "Mount Ambarzumian Observatory, on Farside. Still a little dust and gas to bother us, of course, but I'll let the purists go out to Pluto Satellite and bring me back their plates.”
On a side note, this quote from We Have Fed Our Sea (1958) by Poul Anderson is the first use of the term "farside" for the half (roughly speaking) of the Moon that is not visible from the Earth.
I, Charles Harver, was born in Chicago, March 9th, 2014. But in my earliest, murky memories, Earth was only a place known from television, picture books, and the nostalgic remarks of my parents. We had a house and a flower and vegetable garden under a transparent airdome of dark blue plastic. The sun would shine among the stars for what I heard was fourteen days; then, for another two weeks the solar lamps would burn in the dome top.
For radioastronomers, the far side of the Moon could be the last unspoilt refuge in the Solar System. Planet Earth — and all the human-made electromagnetic noise it spews out into space — stays permanently below the horizon, so that any radio observatories positioned there would be free to observe the cosmos without interference.
The Authority booked first-class passages for all expeditionary personnel, which in the case of a hop up to the Moon meant a direct ferry traveling at one gee all the way. Standing by the observation window, an untasted drink in his hand, David Ryerson remarked: "You know, this is only the third time I’ve been off Earth. And the other two, we trans-shipped at Satellite and went free-fall most of the way.”
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 2/27/2023)
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