Please join us for the:
WMSAE, AIAA, ASM Joint Fall 2025 Dinner Event: The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope presented by General Ron Wilson
Date: Thursday, October 16, 2025
Time: 5:30 pm Social Hour: Fellowship and Networking
6:30 pm Dinner
6:45 pm Brief Presentation by Allied High Tech Products
7:00 pm Main Presentation
8:20 pm Questions & Comments
Location: El Arrierro 2948 28th Street SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49512
Cost: All attendees welcome.
Members and Non-members $35.00
Students, retirees and unemployed $20.00
Payment: Check or cash at the door.
Sorry, we are unable to take credit or debit cards.
RESERVATIONS: DaAliya@itothen.com
You MUST sign up by Thursday, October 9, at NOON.
SPEAKER BIO:
Brigadier General Ronald W. Wilson (Ret.) has served as the Director of the Joint Staff for the Michigan National Guard. In this role, he oversaw the coordination and integration of Army and Air assets to support Michigan in the domestic operations enterprise. He has served in numerous assignments in both flying and operations, as well as command positions from the squadron through wing level. General Wilson has deployed in support of multiple operations including Operations Southern Watch, Allied Force, Iraqi Freedom, and Enduring Freedom.
General Wilson has spent the last several years in a master’s program at American Public University, gaining a master’s degree in Space Studies, with a concentration on astronomy. His thesis, culminating his master’s degree, is exploring the utilization of active surface being applied to the LCRT. To include active surface General Wilson has been also exploring lunar dust and laser mitigation technology for LCRT.
PRESENTATION DETAILS:
Topic: The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope
The Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) is a proposal for an ultra-long-wavelength radio telescope on the far-side of the Moon that can enable major cosmological discoveries. Gen Wilson is part of a team that’s proposing a design to deploy a 350 m diameter wire-mesh parabolic reflector and a 40 m feed antenna in a 1.3 km diameter lunar crater on the far side of the Moon.
An ultra-long-wavelength radio telescope in this location has significant advantages compared to Earth-based and Earth-orbiting telescopes, including:
- Enabling observations of the early Universe at wavelengths longer than 10 meters (i.e., frequencies below 30 MHz), at which critical cosmological signatures from the “Dark Ages” are predicted to appear. These wavelengths cannot be observed from Earth-surface or Earth-orbit, due to ionospheric absorption and reflection.
- The Moon acts as a physical shield, isolating a lunar surface telescope from radio interference or noise sources from the Earth’s surface, the ionosphere, Earth-orbiting satellites, and the Sun’s radio emission during the lunar night.
LCRT could enable scientific discoveries in the field of cosmology by observing the early Universe in the 10–100 m wavelength λ band (i.e. 3–30 MHz frequency ν band), which has not been explored for cosmological observations to date.
