Large-scale Array for Radio Astronomy on the Farside

Abstract

At the Royal Society meeting in 2023, we have mainly presented our lunar orbit array concept called DSL, and also briefly introduced a concept of a lunar surface array, LARAF. As the DSL concept had been presented before, in this article we introduce the LARAF. We propose to build an array in the far side of the Moon, with a master station which handles the data collection and processing, and 20 stations with maximum baseline of 10 km. Each station consists 12 membrane antenna units, and the stations are connected to the master station by power line and optical fiber. The array will make interferometric observation in the 0.1-50 MHz band during the lunar night, powered by regenerated fuel cells (RFCs). The whole array can be carried to the lunar surface with a heavy rocket mission, and deployed with a rover in 8 months. Such an array would be an important step in the long term development of lunar based ultralong wavelength radio astronomy. It has a sufficiently high sensitivity to observe many radio sources in the sky, though still short of the dark age fluctuations. We discuss the possible options in the power supply, data communication, deployment, etc.

final submission version, 30 pages, 16 figures

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• Synthesis imaging with a lunar orbit array: I. global sky map and its systematics
• Astrophysical uncertainties challenge 21-cm forecasts: A primordial black hole case study
• A Multi-Mechanism Hybrid Model of Peaked-Spectrum Radio Sources
• The impact of lunar topography on the 21-cm power spectrum for grid-based arrays : Insights for the Dark-ages EXplorer (DEX)
• Configuration Requirements for 21-cm Forest Background Quasar Searches with the Moon-based Interferometer