South Korea’s Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, Danuri, which launched in August 2022, has despatched again its first photographs of Earth’s sole pure satellite tv for pc, plus some pictures of our residence planet as seen from lunar orbit.
Here is one of many latter – a part of a collection of snaps Danuri captured of Earth throughout a month of observations.
The phases of Earth as seen from the Moon, captured by South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter – Click on to enlarge
The probe’s photographs of the Moon, as shared on Facebook, present Luna in all its grey lack of glory.
South Korea’s Aeronautics Analysis Institute (KARI) mentioned the photographs had been captured throughout trials of the Danuri orbiter staged between January 2 and February 3.
These trials commenced after the craft reached its supposed orbit round 100km above the lunar floor in December 2022.
KARI is glad that the pictures and different proof show that Danuri has efficiently switched from Earth-lunar navigation mode to mission operation mode. Information transmissions had been examined and located to be shipshape. That is necessary as a result of considered one of Danuri’s missions is to check Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) – a networking expertise designed to increase web requirements into the high-latency setting.
The craft may also seize polarized photographs of the Moon’s floor, observe its magnetic fields, and conduct different observations it is hoped will discover indications of water.
Danuri’s mission plan requires a yr of such observations.
Readers might have seen the prolonged delay between Danuri’s August launch and December arrival in lunar orbit. That lengthy journey was by design: Danuri was the only payload aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher – a car that had ample energy and gas to propel the 678kg craft into an Earth escape orbit however not sufficient to fit it right into a lunar orbit.
The probe was due to this fact swung across the Solar, then into near-lunar orbit, earlier than being maneuvered to its present trajectory.
South Korea’s area program is at the moment modest, because the nation principally depends on different nations’ launch platforms. That modified in 2022 when the home-grown Nuri launcher succesfully placed a payload in orbit. ®
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