Liquid Mirror Telescopes on the Moon
October 9, 2008 | Source: KurzweilAI
A team of internationally renowned astronomers and opticians proposes to make “unbelievably large” telescopes on the Moon using liquid mirrors.
Artist's concept of a spinning liquid mirror telescope on the Moon. (Univ. of British Columbia)
A parabolic mirror on the moon could be created using a slowly rotating ionic solution (molten salts} with an ultrathin (<100 nanometers) silver coating, powered by solar collectors. Astronomer Dr. Simon "Pete" Worden, director of NASA Ames Research Center, estimates that all the materials for an entire lunar telescope 20 meters across would be "only a few tons, which could be boosted to the Moon in a single Ares 5 mission in the 2020s." Future telescopes might have mirrors as large as 100 meters in diameter, which could peer back in time to when the universe was only half a billion years old, when the first generation of stars and galaxies were forming. Source: Science@NASA News
