Overview
LuSEE-Night is a trailblazing radio experiment launching in late 2026 to the lunar farside, where it will pioneer ultra-long-wavelength astrophysics by observing in the Moon's shielded zone and make precision measurements of the radio sky at frequencies below Earth's ionospheric cutoff. This talk will give an overview of the current mission status, expected science, and experimental challenges. LuSEE-Night will employ four 3-m antennas to map the sub-50-MHz sky and will uniquely include an orbital calibrator for absolute calibration. When it lands on the Moon next year, the experiment will break ground on a wide variety of physics, build towards a detection of the global signal of the redshifted 21 cm line from the Dark Ages, and pioneer the development of radio telescopes on the Moon. LuSEE-Night will also be a unique instrument for exploring star–planet and lunar interactions in the farside plasma environment, opening the ultra-low-frequency sky to magnetospheric phenomena from substellar objects like Jupiter—and eventually M-dwarfs, brown dwarfs, and exoplanets.