Multiple space agencies are planning lunar missions to establish long-term infrastructure, including NASA's Lunar Gateway and Artemis Base Camp, the Chinese-Roscosmos ILRS, and ESA's Moon Village. These initiatives incorporate research facilities and scientific experiments, particularly in radio astronomy.
A European team has proposed the Dark Ages Explorer (DEX), a single-dish radio interferometer designed to study the Cosmic Dark Ages and Cosmic Dawn, offering insights into the early Universe. The early Universe, approximately 380,000 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, was filled with neutral hydrogen, marking the Cosmic Dark Ages with limited light sources.
DEX will generate continuous sky snapshots at various frequencies, integrated over time for data management. Processing pipelines will extract spatial and spectral variations, avoiding foreground interference. The Moon's far side provides ideal conditions for observatories, shielded from Earth's radio interference and absent of atmospheric distortion, though significant engineering challenges remain in building and maintaining such an observatory.
The DEX study builds on ESA's previous work, including the Astrophysical Lunar Observatory Topical Team (ALO TT) formed in 2020. A feasibility study confirmed that a lunar observatory is possible with current technologies, though a larger scale is needed for major scientific breakthroughs. The development of these technologies will have spin-off applications on Earth, benefiting small satellite communications and radio receivers for harsh environments.
Measurements of spatial power spectra from the Dark Ages and Cosmic Dawn can link to imaging matter clumping, aiding in understanding supermassive black hole evolution and early galactic feedback in galaxy growth.