Proposed Lunar Telescope Made From Moon Dust

June 9, 2008 -- A NASA scientist has a practical idea for building a telescope on the moon. Rather than flying one there, use the lunar soil to make one on site.

"We believe we have found a way to turn moon dust into a telescope," said Peter Chen, with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Chen, an inventor who has been working with carbon-fiber materials to produce high-quality telescope mirrors, began experimenting with tiny tubes of carbon, called nanotubes, glue-like epoxies and crushed rock that resembles lunar dust.

"First we had something very gooey and smelly," Chen told reporters at the American Astronomical Society meeting in St. Louis, Mo., last week. "Then we had this very hard, very stable material like concrete."

The substance could be used to make not only a telescope's support structure, but its light-collecting mirror as well. A small amount of aluminum coating would provide reflectivity.

Chen and colleagues already have built a model telescope using the simulated lunar dust and believe the technique could be scaled up to manufacture a 50-meter observatory. The world's largest telescope is currently the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias on La Palma, Canary Islands.