An important moment in the history of stargazing is achieved with the release of the portrait to the Moon from Earth with the highest resolution and detail in its entire history. All thanks to the power of Green Bank Radio Telescope.
In recent years, our closest star has once again become a matter of obsession for the scientific community focused on space exploration and the observation of celestial bodies.
We have the perfect example of this new era of lunar fixation with the space race that led to it. POT and the Chinese Space Agency are living to see who will be the first nation to get there in the 21st century.
Meanwhile, other areas of this scientific field of study have made some very relevant advances, such as the one recently obtained by the Green Bank telescope.
Since, being from our planet Earth, this device has managed to capture the most spectacular and detailed portrait of our companion star in all of history.
This is what the Moon looks like from Earth
Friends of IFL Science have published an impressive article detailing how the technical team behind the operation of this radio telescope was able to achieve a brutal photograph of the Moon.
Using for this photo a low power radar transmitter with 700 watts output power at 13.9 gigahertz. Achieving with this that the radio waves bounce off the surface of the Moon to be reflected and obtain this image:
What we see here is, roughly speaking, the rebound of a series of spectra, where the reflected waves are collected by the ten antennas of the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) taking full advantage of the radio telescope’s capture ground range spanning the 100 meters:
“It’s pretty amazing what we’ve been able to capture so far, using less energy than a common appliance. In our tests, we were able to zero in on an asteroid 2.1 million kilometers from us, more than 5 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.
The asteroid is about a kilometer in size, which is large enough to cause global devastation upon impact. With the high power system, we could study more objects much further away. When it comes to strategizing for potential impacts, having more lead time is everything.”
This is what Patrick Taylor, head of the radar division of the Green Bank Observatory (GBO) and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) points out, detailing how they achieved this image and the uses they can give it to study other celestial bodies.
