Moon Farside Protection, Moon Village and PAC (Protected Antipode Circle)

摘要

The Moon Farside is the only place in space, and not too far from the Earth, where radio transmissions and noises produced by Humanity on Earth may not reach since the spherical body of the Moon blocks them, acting like a shield. Thus, protecting the Moon Farside from all kinds of non-scientific future exploitations (e.g. real estate, tourism and military) has long been a concern for many far-sighted space scientists as well as for several IAA Academicians. We started facing this problem in the 1990s, when the French radio astronomer Jean Heidmann of the Paris Meudon Observatory first promoted an IAA Cosmic Study about which areas of the Moon Farside should be reserved for scientific uses only. But Heidmann passed away on July 3rd, 2000, and his work had to be continued by others. This author took over his IAA Cosmic study and a paper describing both the scientific and legal aspects of the problem was published in 2008 (see Ref. [1]), Later, on June 10, 2010, this author was the first scientist to present the case for the Moon Farside Protection at the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs in Vienna (see Ref. [2]) during a meeting of UN-COPUOS, the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Unfortunately, the undeclared but quite real “current, new race to the Moon” complicates matters terribly. All the space–faring nations now keep their eyes on the Moon, and only the United Nations might have a sufficient authority to Protect the Farside and keep safe its unique “radio-noise free” environment. But time is money, and the “Moon Settlers” may well reach the Moon before the United Nations come to agree about any official decision concerning the Farside Protection. Quite an URGENT ISSUE. In this paper, we firstly define the PAC (= Protected Antipode Circle), i.e. a circular piece of land on the Farside having its center at the Antipode of the Earth and tangent to the +30° and -30° parallels. This turns out measuring about 1820 km in diameter on the surface of the Moon Farside. Then we propose that the new “Moon Village”, supported by the vision of the ESA Director General, Jan Woerner, be located OUTSIDE the PAC (obviously not to interfere with the detection of radiation coming from space) and also SOUTH OF THE PAC, to be “close” to the South Pole as much as needed in order to benefit of frozen water there. It thus appears that the best venue for the “Moon Village” would be on or around the 180° meridian and possibly quite close to the South Pole.