[ad_1]
Scientists captured this striking image of the Apollo 15 landing site by firing a powerful radar signal from Earth in space and bounce it off the lunar surface.
The thin, winding channel running through the middle of the image is the Hadley Rille, a scar left on the Moon after past volcanic activity, probably a collapsing lava tube, according to one declaration of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). The circular bump shown near the groove is Hadley C, a crater about four miles in diameter.
Scientists have spent two years developing the technology to take these detailed images of Earth’s moon, and now they can capture snapshots of lunar objects as small as 5 meters in diameter to about 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers). ) distance. In the future, the researchers plan to further develop the technology, to the point where they can launch radar signals to the far reaches of the solar system and capture images of Uranus and Neptune, which are at their closest 1.6 billion miles (2.6 billion km) and 2.7 billion miles (4.3 billion km) from Earth, respectively, according to Space.com.
Related: Supermoon photos: the full moon rises across the world
“The planned system will be a leap forward in radar science, providing access to unheard of features of the solar system from here on Earth,” said Karen O’Neil, site manager of the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. in the NRAO statement.
But how does the new technology work? Scientists attached a radar transmitter to the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), the largest fully steerable radio telescope on Earth. Thus equipped and directed towards the moon, the telescope could transmit radar signals to the lunar surface. These signals then ricocheted back to Earth, where they were captured by NRAO’s Very Long Baseline Array, a network of observing stations with large satellite dishes scattered across the United States.
NRAO, the Green Bank Observatory and Raytheon Intelligence & Space, the company that developed the radar transmitter, captured the new images of the Apollo 15 landing site in November 2020, while performing a proof of concept of the technology. They are currently finalizing a plan to develop an even more powerful radar system capable of capturing high-resolution images of near-Earth objects and the solar system’s outermost planets.
“We have been involved in important solar system radar studies before, but turning the GBT into a steerable planetary radar transmitter will greatly expand our ability to pursue intriguing new lines of research,” Tony Beasley, NRAO director and vice-president president for Radio Astronomy at Associated Universities, Inc., said in the statement.
Originally posted on Live Science.
[ad_2]
Source link