NASA’s Artemis moon missions are a game changer for astronomy

April 8, 2026

8 min read

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NASA’s Artemis moon missions are a game changer for astronomy

After decades of planning, NASA’s Artemis program is giving astronomers their long-awaited moonshot

By Joseph Howlett edited by Lee Billings

The Artemis-Enabled Stellar Imager (AeSI) will use an array of mirrors mounted on rovers to take high-resolution photograph of faraway stars at every stage of their life cycle.

Britt Griswold/GSFC

NASA has launched four astronauts on a pioneering journey around the moon—the Artemis II mission. Follow our coverage here.

As the U.S. government slashes its spending on basic science, one thing seems certain: there’s still plenty of money to go back to the moon.

NASA’s Artemis II mission is only the tip of the space agency’s lunar-exploration spear: planning for a plethora of additional crewed and robotic follow-ups is well underway. And all of these trips could carry equipment for groundbreaking research, too.

There’s a lot to learn on the moon. Most of it is about the moon itself—its murky origins, expansive history and even the vital resources it might hold. But some astronomers, faced with increasingly austere government funding for their ground- and space-based projects, are beginning to see the moon as a more fiscally-stable scientific stage for some of their most ambitious cosmic studies.

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An Antenna on the Lunar Far Side

Anže Slosar, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, had once hoped to put a radio telescope on the far side of the moon, but abandoned his dream years ago. The mission just seemed too expensive, and there wasn’t enough interest in it. “After the Apollo landings, the thinking was, ‘we’ve done it,’ and that was that,” he recalls.

Sentiments changed during the first Trump administration. One day Slosar got an e-mail from a Department of Energy program director asking him if he still thought building a far side radio telescope was possible and whether he was interested in leading the DOE’s involvement with such a project.

“This is an unusual way for science to go,” Slosar says. “Usually you have to jump through so many hoops, and now we just got funding for this project out of nowhere.”

It was the easiest choice of his professional career. “I said, ‘Of course!’” he recalls. “It changed my life forever.”

The reason for Slosar’s enthusiasm is that a radio telescope on the moon could do things none on Earth can. Radio telescopes on the ground can only collect signals from a limited range of wavelengths. That’s because, as air molecules in the upper atmosphere soak up the sun’s ultraviolet rays, they get so excited that they shed their electrons and become “ionized” in the process. For most radio waves, the resulting ion-filled layer—the ionosphere—is like a giant mirror, blocking many inbound cosmic messengers.

Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment–Night (LuSEE-Night) is the first step toward building a radio observatory on the far side of the moon to investigate the mysterious “cosmic dark ages.”

Firefly Aerospace

Unfortunately, the solution isn’t as simple as removing Earth’s atmosphere—or, more plausibly, launching a radio telescope into space. To be of much use to radio astronomers, any spaceborne observatory would need to be exquisitely sensitive—so sensitive, in fact, that its observations would be inevitably swamped by telecommunications emanating from Earth. To tune in to distant galaxies and other faraway objects, astronomers would need an antenna somewhere with no atmosphere that also would be somehow protected from all our terrestrial chatter.

Such a place exists, of course, and it’s only a proverbial stone’s throw from our third rock from the sun. Earth is locked in a synchronous dance with the moon, so the same lunar hemisphere always faces away from us. On that far side surface, the moon itself acts as a shield from Earth’s cacophony of radio signals. This is exactly why Houston Ground Control lost contact with Artemis II for about 40 minutes during its April 6 lunar flyby, when the mission’s Orion spacecraft was masked by the moon.

“Behind the moon, at the right time, you can avoid interference from both the sun and the Earth,” Slosar says. “It becomes one of the quietest places in our solar system for observing these radio frequences.”

That span of wavelengths happens to be a window into the most mysterious epoch of the universe’s