South Korea launches its first mission to the moon in new wave of space exploration

August 2, 2022

Robert

If all goes well, South Korea’s first mission to the moon is set to depart this Thursday (4), ushering in what promises to be a new era of lunar exploration, in which multiple countries and companies have interests in Earth’s natural satellite. .

Better known by the acronym KPLO (Korean Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter), the spacecraft will be dispatched on its way by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, to be launched from platform 40 of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, in Florida. The take-off is scheduled for 20:08 (Brasília time).

Its primary mission, as the name suggests, is to pave the way for future lunar exploration by South Koreans. It is the first deep space mission to be conducted by that country. The pioneering and pioneering aspect of the project is also represented by the popular name given to the orbiter: Danuri, a combination of the words “dal” and “nurida” in Korean, which mean something like “enjoy the moon”.

Still, that doesn’t mean that KPLO doesn’t have the potential to do quality science. “The basic idea of this mission is technological development and demonstration,” explains Eunhyeuk Kim, a researcher at Kari (Korea Aerospace Research Institute, something like the South Koreans’ NASA). “Also, using scientific instruments, we are hoping to get useful data from the lunar surface.”

eyeing the shadows

The spacecraft, weighing 678 kg, has six instruments on board, five developed in South Korea and one in the United States. The American one, known as ShadowCam, is a new version of the main camera of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), an American lunar orbiter that has been operating since 2009.

Only, while the original was designed to photograph the illuminated regions of the Moon, this new camera is focused on recording the shadows, with sensitivity hundreds of times greater than what is done with the original LRO camera. The plan is to observe the very little light reflected from the interior of craters located at the lunar poles, where sunlight never falls directly and the presence of water ice has already been detected (by other means).

It is an essential natural resource for the future of lunar exploration. It becomes much more complicated to maintain a manned base having to take all the necessary water from Earth.

The other instruments are a lunar terrain camera (Luti), designed to capture surface images with a spatial resolution of less than 5 meters per pixel and help plan the next South Korean landing mission; a wide-field polarimetric camera (PolCam), which will capture polarized light from the entire surface of the Moon except the poles, in order to investigate the characteristics of the lunar soil; a magnetometer (Kmag), to measure magnetic fields around the Moon; and a delay-tolerant network communication (DTNPL) experiment, an effort to develop a type of interplanetary digital connection better suited for future missions.

Work, however, will only begin in earnest after the orbiter reaches the Moon and settles into its scientific orbit. And that will take some time.

If it manages to depart as planned, on the 4th, or at the latest by the end of the first week of August, the KPLO will settle into the Moon’s orbit on December 16th. The mission managers opted for a ballistic capture trajectory — which is to say that it will not be necessary to make a specific propelled maneuver for the orbital insertion, the probe will simply “fall” in the vicinity of the Moon at the right speed to be captured by lunar gravity. and placed in orbit.

To accomplish this path, the spacecraft will first be placed on its way to the Lagrange point between Earth and the Sun, about 1.5 million km away. From there, the vehicle will “fall” back towards Earth, being intercepted by the Moon (about 390 km from the Earth’s surface) on the way. After orbital insertion, KPLO’s thrusters will only be used to circle the orbit, stabilizing it at an altitude of about 100 km from the lunar surface, towards the end of the year. This is followed by a month of instrumentation testing and commissioning, with scientific operations expected to begin in February 2023. Depending on the efficiency of the maneuvers and the availability of onboard fuel, the mission may be extended beyond 2024.

The South Korean lunar mission, estimated to cost $180 million, began in 2016 and was originally scheduled to launch in 2020. Two years late, it left. And many more are coming in the coming months.

Transit to the Moon

The new lunar wave got off to a tentative start in 2022 with the launch of NASA’s Capstone cubesat, made by a small Electron rocket, in June. It is a small spacecraft bound for orbit in which the American space agency intends to place a future lunar orbital station called Gateway.

NASA’s big lunar launch, however, is scheduled for later this month. On August 29, if all goes well, the Artemis I mission should depart, the first test of the SLS rocket with the Orion capsule on a trip to the Moon. The vehicle will not be crewed for this maiden flight, but it will be the first time that a spacecraft intended to transport humans has set off towards the Moon since Apollo 17, in 1972. The flight will also take small satellites to the vicinity of the Moon, cubesats provided by the USA. , Italy and Japan.

Next, who promises to resume its lunar missions after a long interlude is Russia. The flight of the Luna-25 probe, which resumes the numbering of the Soviet lunar missions program, is due to leave at the end of September — if it happens. There are doubts after the start of the war with Ukraine.

Japanese company ispace aims to launch its lunar lander for the first time in November. If it does fly, it will take a small rover from the United Arab Emirates on board. In addition, two US companies, Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic, intend to launch their own landers on inaugural demonstration missions. One of the payloads is the Mexican Colmena microrover.

For 2023, in addition to commercial missions, Isro, the Indian space agency, is expected to launch its third lunar mission, Chandrayaan-3, and Jaxa, the Japanese space agency, is also in line with its Slim lander. Neighboring China, meanwhile, plans two more lunar missions, Chang’e-6 and 7, for 2024. Even if only a few of these missions take place within the projected timeframe, the transit from here to the Moon should be well bottled up from now.