AS POTENTIAL conservation areas go, it has to be the bleakest. But this hasn’t 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’s 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’s far side as the “Protected Antipode Circle”. A…
