Vignyana Kathegalu
Clear Skies over a Steady Horizon: Astronomy from the Moon
Speaker: Professor Jan Harms (Gran Sasso Science Institute, L'Aquila, Italy.)
Humanity has entered a new era of lunar exploration with participation of all the space-faring countries in the world. Ever increasing payloads and complex surface operations will be realized in the coming decades. This opens opportunities for astronomy as well. The far side of the Moon is protected from Earth's radio emissions, which greatly reduces radio interference and enables breakthrough science with radio astronomy. Similarly, absence of oceans, atmosphere and humans means that ground vibration on the Moon is extremely weak, which makes the Moon an ideal platform for gravitational-wave detectors. In addition to these unique geophysical conditions on the Moon, an advantage compared to satellite missions is that lunar instruments can be larger and more complex. This has led to several other proposals like lunar X-ray or infrared telescopes. In this talk, I will present some of the exciting ideas for lunar astronomical observatories and how they might revolutionize our understanding of astrophysics and cosmology.
He earned his PhD in gravitational-wave detection at the Albert-Einstein-Institute in Germany (2006) and spent several years in the USA working with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration before joining the Virgo Collaboration in Italy.
His research focuses on the design and development of advanced gravitational-wave (GW) detector technologies and on the development of analysis techniques for GW signals.
Prof. Harms is a member of the Virgo and Einstein Telescope collaborations. He manages the development of a sub-system of the AdVirgo+ detector for the mitigation of terrestrial gravity noise. He is also a co-chair of the Instrument Science Board of the Einstein Telescope, which is responsible for the delivery of the technical design of the detector.
Prof. Harms is a coordinator of the Lunar Gravitational-Wave Antenna project. He is coordinating the underground GEMINI experiment at the National Laboratories of Gran Sasso for the development of vibration-control technologies for the Einstein Telescope and to test next-generation inertial sensors for enhanced vibration control and lunar observations.