SETI wants to put a listening station on the far side of the moon.

SETI SCIENTISTS TO DEVISE PLAN FOR LUNAR LISTENING STATION

A few dozen SETI scientists are gathering in Sydney, Australia.




Their goal: to lay the foundation for what may become the most ambitious alien-hunting mission in history: a dedicated SETI observatory on the farside of the moon.






Although it will be years before a SETI radio telescope lands on the moon, the three-day conference that began on May 22nd in Australia is an important first step in that direction and will mark the first time that the requirements for a SETI lunar observatory mission have been rigorously defined. The goal of the attendees is to hash out the technical specifications for this mission, which will inform a formal Phase A study that the group hopes to publish by the end of next year.






The study grew from a paper submitted by researchers from Breakthrough Listen, the world’s largest SETI program, to the National Academy of Sciences’ 2020 Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey that made the case for a SETI observatory on the lunar farside. Now, with additional support from Breakthrough Listen, an international coalition of SETI researchers will take the rough sketch presented to the Decadal Survey and use it to create a detailed plan for what this mission would actually look like.






“The benefits of a technosignature observatory on the lunar farside were identified early on in SETI, but it was just not thought to be a credible prospect because of the very large costs involved with putting anything on the moon,” said Andrew Siemion, the Director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and a leader of the Phase A study. “That recently changed for a number of reasons, but I think most importantly the advent of commercial spaceflight dramatically reduced the cost of bringing a payload to the lunar surface, which has fueled something of a renaissance in lunar astronomy.”

There are two main reasons that SETI researchers are interested in building an observatory on the lunar farside. The first is that the Earth is a very loud place, electromagnetically speaking. Satellites, cell phones, TV towers, military radars, and other modern technologies all produce high-frequency radio signals in the same part of the spectrum where SETI scientists are looking for messages from ET. The second is that the Earth is enveloped in a thick atmosphere that blocks about a quarter of the high-frequency radio spectrum from ever reaching the Earth’s surface.