Radiowave Observations on the Lunar Surface of the photo-Electron Sheath instrument (ROLSES- 1) onboard the Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lunar lander represents NASA’s first radio telescope on the Moon, and the first United States spacecraft landing on the lunar surface in five decades.
Despite a host of challenges, ROLSES-1 managed to collect a small amount of data over fractions of one day during cruise phase and two days on the lunar surface with four monopole stacer antennas that were in a non-ideal deployment. All antennas recorded shortwave radio transmissions breaking through the Earth’s ionosphere — or terrestrial technosignatures — from spectral and raw waveform data.
These technosignatures appear to be modulated by density fluctuations in the Earth’s ionosphere and could be used as markers when searching for extraterrestrial intelligence from habitable exoplanets.
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