Low Radio Frequency Observations from the Moon Enabled by NASA Landed Payload Missions

Understand

A new era of exploration of the low radio frequency Universe from the Moon will soon be underway with landed payload missions facilitated by NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

• CLPS landers are scheduled to deliver two radio science experiments, ROLSES to the nearside and LuSEE to the farside, beginning in 2021.
• These instruments would be pathfinders for a 10-km diameter interferometric array, FARSIDE, composed of 128 pairs of dipole antennas proposed to be delivered to the lunar surface later in the decade.
• ROLSES and LuSEE, operating at frequencies from 100 kHz to a few tens of MHz, will investigate the plasma environment above the lunar surface and measure the fidelity of radio spectra on the surface.