Some of the coldest and darkest places in the solar system may soon become home to one of humanity’s most advanced scientific tools.
Researchers led by physicist Jun Ye are proposing a bold idea: placing ultrastable lasers inside permanently shadowed craters near the moon’s south pole.
These lasers could one day help spacecraft navigate the moon, support future lunar bases, and even detect mysterious ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves.
The idea may sound futuristic, but scientists believe the moon’s unique environment makes it an ideal place for this technology.
Unlike Earth, the moon has almost no atmosphere and very little vibration. This creates extremely stable conditions for sensitive scientific instruments.
Some craters near the lunar south pole are even more special because sunlight never reaches them.
These regions remain in permanent darkness and stay incredibly cold, around 50 kelvins, or about minus 223 degrees Celsius.
According to the researchers, these extreme conditions are perfect for operating an optical silicon cavity, a key part of an ultrastable laser system.
An optical cavity is essentially a carefully designed block of silicon with mirrors placed at each end. Laser light bounces back and forth between the mirrors. For the laser to remain perfectly stable, the distance between the mirrors must stay almost completely unchanged.
On Earth, tiny vibrations and temperature changes constantly disturb this distance. But inside the moon’s frozen craters, those disturbances would be dramatically reduced.
The researchers say the environment could naturally cool the system even further, down to around 16 kelvins, simply by radiating leftover heat into deep space. At this temperature, silicon barely changes size at all, even with small temperature fluctuations. That stability would allow the laser to maintain an extremely consistent frequency, or color.
Once installed, the laser could become part of a GPS-like navigation system for the moon. Future lunar spacecraft, especially those attempting to land near the dark polar regions, could use the laser signals to determine their position with great precision.
The system could also help create the first optical atomic clock network on another world. By synchronizing the lunar lasers with atomic clocks on satellites, scientists could establish highly accurate timekeeping on the moon.
The proposal was described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers from National Institute of Standards and Technology, JILA, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and other collaborators.
Scientists also believe a network of these lasers could measure tiny distance changes across the moon with incredible precision. This might allow the system to detect gravitational waves, faint distortions in space-time caused by massive cosmic events such as black hole collisions.
The technology may arrive sooner than many people expect. Researchers estimate that a silicon optical cavity could be tested in low-Earth orbit within two years and potentially deployed on the moon within three to five years.
NASA’s Artemis program already plans to explore regions near these permanently shadowed craters because they may contain water ice and other important resources needed for long-term human missions on the moon.
