Scientists captured this striking image of the Apollo 15 landing site by firing a powerful radar signal Soil into space and reflects off the lunar surface.
The thin, meandering channel that runs through the center of the image is the Hadley Rille, a scar left on the Moon after volcanic activity in the past, likely a collapsing lava tube, according to a statement from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO). The round dent depicted at the rill is Hadley C, a crater about 6 kilometers in diameter.
Scientists spent two years developing the technology to take these detailed images of the moon from Earth, and now they can take snapshots of lunar objects as small as 16.4 feet (5 meters) over a distance of about 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers). In the future, the researchers plan to further develop the technology, to the point where it can send radar signals to the far reaches of the world. solar system and create images from Uranus and Neptune, which, according to Space.com, are 1.6 billion miles (2.6 billion km) and 2.7 billion miles (4.3 billion km) from Earth, respectively.
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“The planned system will be a leap forward in radar science and provide access to never-before-seen features of the solar system from here on Earth,” said Karen O’Neil, location director of the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. in the NRAO statement.
But how does the new technology work? Scientists have attached a radar transmitter to the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), the largest fully steerable radio telescope on Earth. Thus equipped and aimed at the moon, the telescope was able to send radar signals to the lunar surface. These signals then bounced back to Earth, where they were captured by the NRAO’s Very Long Baseline Array, a network of observation stations with large antenna dishes across the US.
The 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 conducting a proof-of-concept test of the technology. They are now finalizing a plan to develop an even more powerful radar system that can capture high-resolution images of both near-Earth objects and the outer planets of the solar system.
“We have previously participated in important solar system radar studies, but by turning the GBT into a controllable planetary radar transmitter, we will greatly enhance our ability to pursue intriguing new lines of research,” said Tony Beasley, director of the NRAO and vice-president. president for Radio Astronomy at Associated Universities, Inc., said in the statement.
Originally published on Live Science.