Ancients studied the dark skies with their bare eyes, developing intricate and wonderfully complex calendars and mythologies based upon the countless constellations. Later our ancestors, armed with optical instruments, developed mechanics and calculus during the Scientific Revolution, paving the way for our current engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. And beginning with whom we would dare to call grandfather, Karl Jansky [1], the very material of our origin may be examined by looking beyond the eye and understanding that light is just a small portion of what things emit and reflect all throughout the electromagnetic spectrum [2].
However, with the number of wireless and spurious signal-emitting devices ever increasing, radio astronomers are finding it more and more difficult to cleanly sample portions of the spectrum that are vital to furthering the understanding of the universe and finding an answer to the question, "Are we alone?".
Fortunately, because the moon synchronously rotates with its object of affection, the unseen, far-side of the moon may provide astronomers a chance at an unencumbered view of deep space. Of course, rather than bringing scientists to the moon, our goal is to bring the data to them. In other words, we are developing a remote lunar observatory.
Perhaps the number one problem with setting up a remote observatory is data transfer. The portion of the electromagnetic spectrum currently most interesting to radio astronomers is 1.0 through 4.0 GHz. Given Nyquist’s criterion and a moderate quantization rate, scientists are requiring the transfer of tens-of-gigabits-per-second of data – continuously! Another problem associated with the lunar telescope is continuously transferring data between rotating bodies. Both these problems will be examined in the Design section in further depth.
