LuSEE-Night: A Radio Telescope Designed to Survive the Lunar Cold
This article details the challenges and solutions behind building LuSEE-Night, a radio telescope designed to operate on the Moon, specifically during the long lunar night.Here’s a breakdown of the key points:
* The Challenge: The Moon’s extreme temperature swings (120°C to -130°C) pose the biggest threat to electronics. While radiation hardening and structural integrity are addressed, maintaining operational temperature is a significant hurdle.
* The Solution: A multi-faceted approach:
* Heat Rejection: A multicell parabolic radiator panel will dissipate daytime heat.
* Heat Retention: A large lithium-ion battery pack (38kg out of 108kg total launch mass, with 7,160 watt-hours capacity) will provide power and, crucially, generate heat during the two-week lunar night.
* Power Management: The spectrometer will cycle off periodically to prevent the battery from dropping below 8% charge, prioritizing survival over continuous observation.
* Lessons Learned from Odysseus: The recent Odysseus lander experience (landing hard and sustaining damage) highlights the risks of lunar missions. Odysseus carried ROLSES-1, an experiment led by Burns, which only managed to collect 2 hours of data instead of the planned week due to the landing damage.
* ROLSES-1’s Purpose: This experiment aimed to study the interaction of sunlight,radiation,and lunar soil,including the phenomenon of levitating dust particles that could interfere with radio observations.
In essence, LuSEE-Night is designed with a robust power system and careful energy management to overcome the extreme cold of the lunar night, learning from the challenges faced by previous missions like Odysseus. The focus is on ensuring the telescope can survive the night, even if it means sacrificing some observation time.