SETI & Technosignatures

Results from NASA’s First Radio Telescope on the Moon: Terrestrial Technosignatures and the Low-Frequency Galactic Background Observed by ROLSES-1 Onboard the Odysseus Lander

By Keith Cowing

Status Report

astro-ph.IM

March 15, 2025

Filed under astro-ph.IM, Intuitive Machines, LuSEE-Night, Moon, Odysseus lunar lander, radio, radio telescope, ROLSES- 1, ROLSES- 2, SETI, Technosignatures

Results from NASA’s First Radio Telescope on the Moon: Terrestrial Technosignatures and the Low-Frequency Galactic Background Observed by ROLSES-1 Onboard the Odysseus Lander — Spectra and periodograms for several frequency channels with candidate shortwave transmissions (technosignatures) for antenna D during the In-Transit observation day from the DSP. The top row shows the spectra in decibels relative to its own average value, while the bottom row shows the periodogram for each corresponding channel in the top row. The x-axis for the fluctuations in the top panel are indexed by i and are each eight seconds apart, while the x-axis for the periodograms are signal frequencies in Hertz. Note the level of fluctuations in the spectra as well as the dominant periods in the periodograms: the latter exhibit decreasing power modulation with increasing frequency modulation, as expected for shortwave transmissions breaking through the Earth’s ionosphere. — astro-ph.IM

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.

After data reduction and marshaling a host of statistical and sampling techniques, five minutes of raw waveforms from the least noisy antenna were used to generate covariances constraining both the antenna parameters and the amplitude of the low-frequency isotropic galactic spectrum.

ROLSES- 2 and LuSEE-Night, both lunar radio telescopes launching later in the decade, will have significant upgrades from ROLSES-1 and will be set to take unprecedented measurements of the low-frequency sky, lunar surface, and constrain the cosmological 21-cm signal.

ROLSES-1 represents a trailblazer for lunar radio telescopes, and many of the statistical tools and data reduction techniques presented in this work will be invaluable for upcoming lunar radio telescope missions.

Joshua J. Hibbard, Jack O. Burns, Robert MacDowall, Natchimuthuk Gopalswamy, Scott A. Boardsen, William Farrell, Damon Bradley, Thomas M. Schulszas, Johnny Dorigo Jones, David Rapetti, Jake D. Turner

Comments: 23 pages, 11 figures, submitted to ApJ
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2503.09842 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2503.09842v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2503.09842
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Submission history
From: Joshua Hibbard
[v1] Wed, 12 Mar 2025 21:05:39 UTC (7,484 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09842
Astrobiology, SETI,

Keith Cowing

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him)

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