NASA is leading the race to build a moon colony, with plans to arrive at the lunar satellite penned in for 2024. However, the mission may have to be re-thought if astronomers have anything to say about it. Alien-hunting space experts fear radio signals produced on the moon will interfere with their work, essentially ruling out the possibility of discovering alien signals emitted by an advanced civilisation.
Telescopes such as the five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) in China and the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), to name just two, search for radio signals from deep space.
These radio signals can be created by black holes forming, stars colliding and even an extraterrestrial race trying to communicate throughout the cosmos.
However, without radio silence on the moon, the signals would essentially be blocked out.
Claudio Maccone, director for scientific space exploration at the International Academy of Astronautics and chair of that group’s permanent SETI committee, told Space.com: “All the radio astronomers, whether human or alien, certainly know about this basic frequency line.
“A ‘magic line,’ if you want to put it in that way.
“So far there was nothing magic, because we didn’t find extraterrestrials. Anyway, we keep hoping. We keep our fingers crossed.”
NASA is looking to put humans on the moon for the first time since 1972.
The space agency has decided it has unfinished business on our lunar satellite and wants to set up a permanent base on the Moon, with the missions hopefully taking place in 2024.
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The suit is called the “Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit,” or xEMU, and will be fitted with enough oxygen for astronauts to perform moonwalks for up to eight hours.
Mr Bridenstine unveiled the new suits alongside Amy Ross, a spacesuit engineer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Ms Ross said: “We’ve been working for a long time to build space suits that will do the job on the moon and going on to Mars.
“My job is to take a basketball, shape it like a human, keep them alive in a harsh environment and give them the mobility to do their job.”