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A New View of the Moon

A group of astronomers, including Craig Sarazin from U.Va., have made the first high-resolution, high-frequency radio map of the Moon.  The image, at a radio frequency of 90 GHz, was made with the MUSTANG2 camera on the Green Bank Telescope, the world’s largest steerable telescope.  At this radio frequency, the image shows heat radiation form the lunar surface, and brighter regions are hotter.   The image shows many of the same features as seen in more familiar optical images.  However, because temperature variations across the lunar surface are smaller than the variations in the amount of