Business Insider's NASA patented a faster, cheaper route to the moon. The first spacecraft to use it could make Nobel Prize-winning discoveries about the universe. includes a section titled
2 Nobel Prizes may await in the lunar 'cone of silence'
which says
By slipping behind the moon at a moment when the sun is blocked as well as the Earth, Dapper is expected to make the first clear recordings of neutral hydrogen signal. The spacecraft might also gather evidence of the first stars, and possibly the first black holes and galaxies that formed about 500 million years after the Big Bang, during an epoch called "Cosmic Dawn."
and
Burns and others came up with the Dark Ages Radio Explorer lunar mission about 10 years ago, which is why that mission and not Dapper is described in the patent, which NASA filed in 2015. (The USPTO is a notoriously slow-moving federal organ.)
Burns said that while NASA was excited about DARE — no one had ever done something like it before — the agency was bound by rules that favored established science and hardware over newer approaches.
"There is no history of low-frequency experiments in space. So, on the one side, people are excited: 'Wow, you're opening up an entire new field of cosmology. This is great. This is fantastic. You need to do it,'" Burns said. "The other side is, 'Well, you've never done it before, so it must be risky.' And so you get marked down for the risks."
After years of being passed up, Burns and his colleagues decided to shrink the car-size spacecraft, ditch novel hardware for proven "heritage" technologies, and try again.
Question: What novel technologies did DARE ditch in order to get NASA support?
