Soon, when you’re looking up at the moon at night, people could very well be looking back down at you. A partnership between two private companies plans to install a long-range telescope there as early as 2016, perching it atop the rim of a crater three miles above the surface near the moon’s south pole. The telescope is called the International Lunar Observatory, and with its 2-meter dish antenna, it aims both to give us some heretofore unseen views of the universe and help democratize astrophysics along the way.
The two companies are Moon Express, Inc. — a contender for the $30 million Google Lunar Xprize to land a robot on the moon, and the International Lunar Observatory Association — a nonprofit working to establish a permanent presence there. As it stands, the plan is to bring a precursor to the telescope, a shoebox-sized device called ILO-X (pictured below), to the moon in 2015, before embarking on the mission to its South Pole with the real deal as early as the following year.
via The Verge
