If you woke up tomorrow morning and found yourself on the moon, what would you do? NASA has just released a list of 181 good ideas.

Ever since the end of the Apollo program, “folks around the world have been thinking about returning to the moon, and what they would like to do there,” says Jeff Volosin, strategy development lead for NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. Now, NASA is going back; the agency plans to send astronauts to the Moon no later than 2020. “So we consulted more than 1,000 people from businesses, academia and 13 international space agencies to come up with a master list of 181 potential lunar objectives.”

For example, the moon could be a good location for radio astronomy. A radio telescope on the far side of the Moon would be shielded from Earth’s copious radio noise, and would be able to observe low radio frequencies blocked by Earth’s atmosphere. Observations at these frequencies have never been made before and opening up a window into this low frequency universe will likely lead to many exciting new discoveries.

Carry on reading

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