Moon FARSIDE: Proposal for Dark Ages and Exoplanet Investigations
From Leonard David’s Inside Outer Space: The Moon’s farside is an attention grabber…for many reasons. For good measure, enter the Farside Array for Radio Science Investigations of the Dark ages and Exoplanets, shortened to enlightened shorthand: FARSIDE. This concept is to place a low radio frequency interferometric array on the farside of the Moon, blueprinted by Jack Burns of the University of Colorado, Boulder and Gregg Hallinan of the California Institute of Technology.
Research tasks - As noted in the NASA proposal, FARSIDE would enable near-continuous monitoring of the nearest stellar systems in the search for the radio signatures of coronal mass ejections and energetic particle events, and would also detect the magnetospheres for the nearest candidate habitable exoplanets. Simultaneously, FARSIDE would be used to characterize similar activity in our own solar system, from the Sun to the outer planets, including the hypothetical Planet Nine. As outlined, FARSIDE, among a bevy of duties, would enable an abundance of additional science ranging from sounding of the lunar subsurface to characterization of the interstellar medium in the solar system neighborhood.