The moon is so scorching this yr, with present or future lunar missions deliberate from the U.S., Russia, UAE and Japan, and India. And there’s additionally South Korea, which launched its first lunar mission in August 2022. The Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) arrived in lunar orbit in December 2022, and it just lately despatched again a few gorgeous pictures of Earth as seen from the moon.
The photographs had been shared by the Korea Aerospace Analysis Institute (KARI) and present Earth rising over the moon’s horizon, taken utilizing KPLO’s high-resolution digicam. The spacecraft, often known as Danuri, goals to survey the moon for assets like water ice and metals.
The photographs had been taken on December 24 and December 28, when the craft was at 344 km and 124 km from the moon’s floor respectively. Each present the lunar terrain within the foreground with the attractive marble of the Earth rising over the horizon, taken utilizing the Lunar Terrain Imager (LUTI) instrument which can be used to scout out appropriate places for future missions to land. The instrument can take pictures of the moon’s floor with a spatial decision of round 5 meters, and it’s scouting on behalf of a deliberate robotic lunar lander mission from South Korea aimed for the 2030s.
In line with KARI, the Danuri craft is now “at the moment conducting work similar to checking the efficiency of payloads and adjusting errors, and is scheduled to hold out full-scale science and expertise missions from February.” It will likely be working with its six science devices, together with cameras, a magnetometer, a spectrometer, and a mapping instrument supplied by NASA to map out the places of water ice in areas in everlasting shadow.
One other function of the spacecraft is that it’ll additionally check out a brand new communications expertise in a enjoyable method. The Delay-Tolerant Networking experiment goals to create a communication system for lunar landers which might deal with drops in connectivity — and it assessments this out by enjoying one among South Korea’s best cultural exports, the tune Dynamite by Ok-pop icons BTS.
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