A new era of lunar exploration has begun with participation of all major space agencies. This activity brings opportunities for revolutionary science experiments and observatories on the Moon. The idea of a lunar gravitational-wave detector was already proposed during the Apollo programme. The key characteristic of the Moon is that it is seismically extremely quiet. It was also pointed out that the permanently shadowed regions at the lunar poles provide ideal conditions for gravitational-wave detection. In recent years, three different detector concepts were proposed with varying levels of technological complexity and science potential. In this paper, we confront the three concepts in terms of their observational capabilities based on a first more detailed modelling of instrumental noise. We identify important technological challenges and potential show-stoppers.

This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Astronomy from the Moon: the next decades (part 2)’.

在所有主要航天机构的参与下，月球探索的新时代已经开始。这项活动为月球上革命性的科学实验和观测站带来了机会。月球引力波探测器的想法在阿波罗计划期间就已经提出。月球的主要特征是它的地震极其安静。还有人指出，月球两极的永久阴影区域为引力波探测提供了理想的条件。近年来，提出了三种不同的探测器概念，其技术复杂性和科学潜力各不相同。在本文中，我们基于第一个更详细的仪器噪声建模，从观察能力方面对这三个概念进行了对比。我们确定重要的技术挑战和潜在的阻碍因素。

本文是“月球天文学：未来几十年（第 2 部分）”讨论会议的一部分。