AS POTENTIAL conservation areas go, it has to be the bleakest. But this hasn鈥檛 stopped one astronomer from suggesting that a protected area be set up on the far side of the moon.
Like many of his colleagues, Claudio Maccone of the International Academy of Astronautics in Paris thinks that the moon鈥檚 far side will one day be a haven for radio telescopes, free from the electronic chatter of Earth and the many satellites now orbiting it. Maccone is calling on the United Nations to recognise a 1820-kilometre-diameter zone on the moon鈥檚 far side as the 鈥淧rotected Antipode Circle鈥�. A crater called Daedalus within this area would be suitable for a future radio-astronomy base, he says in Acta Astronautica ().
No one has put the idea to the UN in the past, according to Sergiy Negoda, legal officer at the UN鈥檚 Office for Outer Space Affairs in Vienna, Austria. Creating a legal framework for something so novel can take 鈥測ears, sometimes decades鈥�, he warns.
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Firms claiming to sell moon land say they would welcome a lunar conservation area. 鈥淎nything that protects the moon, front side or back, is to our minds a positive thing,鈥� says William Folkes of MoonEstates in the UK.
