Researchers from UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory belong to a team working on a lunar mission spearheaded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA.

The mission, called the Lunar Surface Electromagnetic Experiment, or LuSEE, will endeavor to, for the first time ever, detect radio signals from a 400-million-year period of history known as the “Dark Ages.” Campus and Berkeley Lab researchers are working with teams from NASA, Brookhaven National Laboratory, or BNL, and the University of Minnesota, according to a Berkeley Lab press release.

“Professor Stuart Bale from the UC Berkeley Physics Department and Space Science Lab was awarded by NASA to lead a project called LuSEE,” said Aritoki Suzuki, who leads the Berkeley Lab team, in an email. “NASA and the Department of Energy decided to work together to expand its science capabilities. After some design iterations, we decided to split the payload into LuSEE-Lite and LuSEE-Night.”

LuSEE-Lite is scheduled to land in 2025, and will measure electric and magnetic fields on the surface near the moon’s south pole. It will also measure ways in which these fields change and interact as the Sun’s position changes relative to the moon.

LuSEE-Night is a radio telescope that will be delivered to the far side of the moon in early 2026. The team hopes that this telescope will detect cosmic background radiation from the universal Dark Ages.

“Though radio waves from the Dark Ages still linger in space, the abundance of radio interference on Earth has masked these signals from scientists seeking to study them,” said Anže Slosar, the lead scientist for LuSEE-Night at BNL, in an email.

The Dark Ages is a time period between when cosmic microwave background radiation was first produced, around 380,000 years after the Big Bang, and when the first star was born, according to Suzuki. He added that the signals from these Dark Ages are difficult to measure because there is no light source from this period.

Radio waves from this time still exist, but the many radio signals on Earth interfere with these and make them difficult to detect, Slosar said. To solve this problem, the team will land their equipment on the far side of the moon, which is shielded from both the Sun and Earth and has no ionosphere, therefore providing a clear environment from where to read Dark Ages radio signals.

“If scientists could detect radio waves from the Dark Ages — what is known as the ‘Dark Ages Signal’ — they could help uncover answers to some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, such as the nature of dark energy or the formation of the universe itself,” Slosar said in an email.

The BNL team is in charge of operating the telescope and of reporting its findings, according to Slosar. They are also responsible for procuring or engineering many of its core components, such as the radio frequency spectrometer which will analyze the radio signals, the instrument’s power and communication infrastructure.

The team at Berkeley Lab is responsible for creating the antenna that will detect the radio signals. According to Suzuki, the team is using a special antenna called a stacer, which is lightweight and can be deployed on command. In addition, the team has experimented with many designs to maximize the antenna’s chances of detecting the Dark Ages signal, according to a Berkeley Lab press release.

“Since the 1950s, scientists have been daydreaming about putting a telescope on the Moon,” Slosar said in an email. “We have developed a state-of-the-art instrument that can form a basis for future experiments, both on the ground and in space.”