That’s simplistic, and incorrect. The astronomical community has been thinking about lunar basing of telescopes for forty years. That thinking was in high gear a full twenty years after the last lunar landing. Only in the last decade or so have they objectively sidestepped the idea, now that pointing a telescope in space is relatively easy, and building large structures in space has been compellingly demonstrated. Lunar basing just doesn’t buy much anymore for astronomy. Unless you think that humans and their infrastructure will be down in the dirt and no where else. That’s an unhappy possibility by any measure of success for the Vision.

“There is an excellent paper by Roger Angel entitled A buyer’s guide to telescopes at the best sites. It examines the probable evolution of astronomy over the next 50 years and contains more than an insight or two about how scientific astronomical high priorities fit into the Moon-Mars initiative and vice versa…”

There are a number of excellent papers on this subject. Angel does have an insight or two, but they are focused on foundations anchored in bedrock under gravity. You might pay some attention to other ideas, which include human and robotic efforts on behalf of astronomy elsewhere in space. (And there is quite lot of space in between the Moon and Mars.)

As I said, build-it-and-they-will-come doesn’t work. You might be led to do that if you desperately need it to justify your presence. Consider what happened when Station needed “science” to justify it. Neither Station nor science got much benefit out of that ploy.

So, are we so bereft of good reasons to develop the Moon that we need to hijack astronomy to justify it? Hmmm. No question that Vision and lunar exploration technology development could offer wonderful new opportunities for astronomy, but we needn’t take a long range view that those opportunities are best harvested on the lunar surface.

I suspect the astronomy community haven’t yet given it a thought. Bear in mind it usually takes a decade or so for a scientific community to embrace any new idea. It takes time for people collectively to take a step back and evaluate things in an objective and long term way.

There is an excellent paper by Roger Angel entitled A buyer’s guide to telescopes at the best sites. It examines the probable evolution of astronomy over the next 50 years and contains more than an insight or two about how scientific astronomical high priorities fit into the Moon-Mars initiative and vice versa…

Well, simple to you maybe! Oh, and by the way, that’s a scrupulously clean, smoothly rotating tray, with a giant overhead structure to capture the focal plane. Now, diffraction-limited baselines of sizes 50+m in free-space are considered technologically realizable by people who understand the ‘biz. Not easy, but we have proven technology that allows that extrapolation without a lot of snickering.

Lunar observatory afficonados need to resist the temptation to propose if-you-build-it-they-will-come facilities. The way science works is that the community develops a consensus to want something that will achieve a high priority science goal, and that’s never come close to happening with a lunar liquid mirror telescope (as it has for many other observatory concepts.) It is a VERY clever idea indeed, but that doesn’t make it worth doing.

Far side radio quiet observatory concepts have some proven merit, though we don’t have any plans for major far side development and, once we have such developments, it ain’t gonna be all that quiet over there.

A large *rotating* tray. 50-100 m of large rotating tray that maintains a smooth paraboloidal surface on the contained Hg or whatever while sitting on the surface of the moon doesn’t sound real easy to me.

Actually, I’ve long been bemused by the idea of a liquid metal mirror (no particular dimension in mind, but bigger is better) in space. A tray that spins at possibly very low speeds accelerated along its axis by ion engines or other very low-thrust, ah, thrusters.

Other than far-side radio astronomy (which could benefit from the moon blocking radio noise from Earth), there’s practically nothing that lunar-based astronomy could do that couldn’t be done better and cheaper by space-based astronomy.

You are free to think whatever you want. But there is an established procedure for how the astronomical community sets its priorities. This proposal will either be accepted or rejected through that procedure.

I think there is immense scientfic value in a diffraction-limited 50 or 100 meter aperture. There’s no point in building it on Earth, and building it in space is cumbersome in comparison to simply pouring liquid into a large tray on the lunar surface. When I go to the Moon I’d rather set up a liquid mirror telescope than sit around being some token gesture of humanity in space:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2004/0930niac_phase1.html

At what cost?

Such a telescope would cost multiple billions of dollars, at least, for a limited scientific capability. And this mission does not appear at the top of anybody’s astronomy wish list.

Dust is a concern, and I expect there will be efforts to characterize the lunar dust environment and the effect of electrostatically levitated dust on the images. My initial thought was that you could move such dust out the way with optical tweezers or some massively arrayed variation of the same, but I think that’s worrying about step 10 when we’re only at step 2.

They cannot really be pointed very far and therefore have a limited field of view, with what would probably be huge development costs. Also, I have my doubts that a giant spinning disk of liquid metal would not attract dust to coat the surface of the mirror.