Step Towards the Development of Lunar Liquid Mirror Telescope

ABSTRACT: Desolate, airless and with no people around for hundreds of thousands of kilometers, the Moon is a great place for astronomers. Sky watchers have an enduring hope of one day building a lunar observatory, where gleaming from the earliest stars can be snared without the curse of man-made light pollution and Earth's atmospheric distortion. But making telescopic mirrors is eye-wateringly expensive, for it requires grinding and polishing glass to an accuracy of a few tens of billionths of a meter and after making a mirror, there's the risk of breaking it when you haul it to the Moon. So, the scientists brought the idea to use a liquid mirror telescope on the surface of the moon, to be known as the lunar liquid mirror telescope (LLMT), that could be hundreds of times more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope. The potential of a return of human presence to the Moon raises the possibility of significant lunar infrastructure and with it the possibility of astronomical installations which can make use of the lunar surface as a stable platform and take advantage of the lack of atmosphere. A study is being conducted to determine the feasibility of constructing a lunar liquid mirror telescope, or LLMT, by NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) and the Canadian Space Agency