NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I Award
Funding: up to $125,000
Study Period: 9 months

FarView – An In Situ Manufactured Lunar Far Side Radio Observatory
Ronald Polidan
Lunar Resources, Inc.
Houston, Texas

We propose to perform an end-to-end system-level study of how to build a very large low frequency (5-40 MHz) radio observatory, “FarView,” on the lunar farside using lunar regolith materials. FarView will be a sparse array of ~100,000 dipole antennas populating a ~20×20 km area.

The innovative technology elements enabling FarView will be the near exclusive use of ISRU and on-site manufacturing of almost all system elements for the radio array, including power generation and energy storage systems.