The Korean Lunar Pathfinder, or KPLO for short, is scheduled to launch over A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket next Tuesday (August 2). The mission is seen as the first step in South Korea’s ambitious deep space agenda, which also includes an automated Earth landing. the moon By 2030 the mission of returning a sample of the asteroid.
In May this year, KPLO was officially named “Danuri,” a combination of two Korean words meaning “moon” and “enjoy.”
The experimental lunar probe will carry a total of six payloads. Five were developed by Korean universities and research institutions, including the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI), and the other from NASA.
The six experiments are a Lunar Terrain Imager (LUTI), a wide-angle polar camera (PolCam), a magnetometer called KMAG, a gamma-ray spectrometer known as KGRS, a payload of the Disturbance Tolerant Network Experiment (DTNPL) and a high sensitivity NASA-funded camera called ShadowCam.
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Main tasks
Danuri will orbit the Moon for at least a year, if all goes according to plan. The orbiter’s main missions will be to measure the magnetic force over the lunar surface and assess lunar resources such as water ice, uranium, helium-3, silicon and aluminum, as well as map the topography to help determine the future. Landing sites on the moon.
The probe will take some time to reach the moon beyond Falcon 9 release; Danuri will use the lunar ballistic transfer path, and will eventually reach lunar orbit in mid-December.
Carrie, based in Daejeon, provided NASA with about 33 pounds (15 kilograms) of payload mass on the orbiter.
In September 2016, NASA issued an order for scientific instruments designed to advance knowledge of the distribution of volatiles such as water, including the movement of these resources toward permanently shaded lunar regions (PSRs) and how they become trapped there.
The result was NASA’s selection of ShadowCam, a tool developed by Arizona State University and San Diego-based Malin Space Science Systems. ShadowCam will take pictures of shaded areas on the moon using a high-resolution camera, telescope and high-sensitivity sensors.
The instrument’s optical camera is based on the Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) on board NASA lunar reconnaissance vehicle (LRO). NAC has been producing images of the moon for more than 13 years now – but KPLO’s new camera is much more sensitive.
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Shadow teaches
Brason Mahanti, ShadowCam deputy principal investigator at Arizona State University in Tempe, said ShadowCam will collect high-resolution images of PSRs as they fly about 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the lunar surface for about a year.
“PSRs are typically found in the lower reaches of host craters and topographic depressions where sunlight never reaches, making these areas extremely cold and therefore favorable sites where volatile species, such as water, methane, and ammonia, can remain trapped (cold traps) for long geological periods,” Mahante told Space.com.
ShadowCam will help to search for files water ice Mahante said the polar craters are done by mapping the reflection within the PSRs. PSRs are illuminated only indirectly, by light reflected from nearby topographic features.
Mahante said the “secondary lighting” is too dim. But the ShadowCam is optimized for shooting under poor lighting conditions, as it’s 200 times more sensitive than the LRO’s NAC (which is one of two cameras that make up the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera System, or LROC).
“Just like the LROC NAC, which has changed our understanding of the moon by collecting unprecedented amounts of high-resolution lunar imagery, ShadowCam will scrutinize deeply shaded regions of the moon to provide the first-ever high-resolution look at permanently shaded lunar regions,” Mahante said.
difficult areas
“It’s a new data set that we don’t have,” said Ben Posey, a ShadowCam research associate at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
“The plan is to map both poles over the course of the year,” he said. “In doing so, we can also look for potential seasonal variations in some of these signatures, if any of the volatiles are in any way transient.”
Posey told Space.com that ShadowCam wouldn’t just look for evidence of water. Another purpose is to identify hazards and determine passability within PSRs, which may assist mission planners in planning trips in and out of these features by future roving vehicles.
“The more raw data we can get on these challenging areas, the more efficient our explorations will be,” Bossi said. “Areas that are permanently shaded will never be easy.”
Bossi said the ShadowCam science team enjoyed working with their Korean colleagues. He said the Danuri team has a very impressive payload range on the country’s first lunar orbiter.
As usual, the moon is looming. And the more countries extract more details about Earth’s nearest neighbor, the more viable their target becomes Continuous human exploration.
Leonard David is the author of “Moon Rush: The New Space Race,” published by National Geographic in May 2019. A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us on Twitter Tweet embed (Opens in a new tab) or on Facebook (Opens in a new tab).