Lunar surface arrays

During the latter half of the 1980's, three concepts for low frequency arrays on the Moon were independently studied for NASA, leading to two work-shops in 1990. Perhaps not surprisingly, when one considers the constraints, the concepts were all quite similar. Each consisted of tens to hundreds of dipoles deployed over tens of kilometers. Each element had a superheterodyne receiver, a digitizer, and a data transmitter and antenna mast. Each team envisioned that the array would start small and grow with time. The main technical challenges were those of deploying the array on the Moon, and of correlating the data on the Moon or returning all the raw data to Earth. We review these lunar low-frequency array concepts and note possible alternative approaches to some of the concept features.