**British Space Firm to Develop Fleet of Satellites for Mapping the Early Universe**
A UK-based space company is set to design a fleet of satellites capable of orbiting the Moon to explore and map the early universe.
Commissioned by the Italian Space Agency, Blue Skies Space aims to create satellites that can detect faint radio signals from the universe’s dawn. These signals are nearly impossible to pick up from Earth due to human-made radio interference; however, the far side of the Moon is naturally shielded from such noise.
Dr. Marcell Tessenyi, the chief executive of Blue Skies Space, stated, “Our goal is to look into those dark ages and gain insights into the large-scale structures of the early universe. Accomplishing this from the Earth’s surface is incredibly challenging.”
The Italian Space Agency has allocated €200,000 for a design project to determine whether a fleet of four or more satellites can successfully detect these radio signals, which fall within the FM radio spectrum. These signatures, originating less than a million years after the Big Bang, could shed light on a period before the formation of the first stars, when the universe was predominantly composed of hydrogen gas.
The far side of the Moon is regarded as an optimal site for detecting these signals, as it blocks interference from Earth.
NASA has achieved the first successful deployment of a radio telescope on the Moon. Its ROLSES-1 (Radio Wave Observations of the Lunar Surface of the Photoelectron Envelope) telescope was installed on the Odysseus lander, an Intuitive Machines spacecraft that shifted onto its side after landing last year. Although some equipment encountered issues, the telescope itself remained operational.
Later this year, NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy plan to launch a small radio telescope to the far side of the Moon as part of an experiment called LuSEE-Night. There are also aspirations to construct a larger radio telescope on the lunar surface, utilizing robots to lay a wire mesh within a lunar crater.
Blue Skies is proposing the use of straightforward CubeSats equipped with readily available commercial components. These CubeSats could orbit the Moon and be integrated into the European Space Agency’s Moonlight program, which aims to establish a constellation of satellites in lunar orbit for enhanced communication and navigation.
Blue Skies envisions that this proposed infrastructure will facilitate precise positioning for astronomy observation satellites and enable the return of valuable data to Earth.
