ROLSES had a bumpy ride aboard the Odysseus Lander earlier this year, but it still pulled off some cool science. A radio telescope on its way to the Moon captured a “selfie” of our planet’s radio waves, updating a vintage 1990s science experiment by Carl Sagan. The ROLSES instrument rode to the Moon aboard Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander in February 2024, which arrived in a crater near the lunar South Pole in February.
Along the way, the team measured the spectrum of radio waves rippling out into space from Earth. It’s not possible yet to decipher all that radio traffic, but it provides an electronic fingerprint of a civilization busily chattering over the airwaves — and leaking that chatter out into space. University of Colorado physicist Jack Burns and his colleagues hope to compare Earth’s radio fingerprint to their observations of other worlds from a telescope they plan to build on the far side of the Moon.
One of the antennas on the ROLSES instrument deployed partway to the Moon, so Burns and his colleagues decided they might as well take some measurements of Earth — and it’s a good thing they did, because they only got about 20 minutes’ worth of data once ROLSES landed on the Moon. Along the way to the Moon, ROLSES repeated a famous Carl Sagan experiment from 1993: It captured the spectrum of radio waves pouring from our planet out into space. What they measured was an electronic fingerprint of all the wavelengths of radio broadcasts that passing.