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Space Focus: South Korea’s first lunar probe will be on its way to the moon

By this time next week, South Korea‘s first lunar probe will be on its way to the moon. The Danuri probe, which means “enjoy the moon,” is expected to arrive at its destination in mid-December and orbit for a year.Scientists are eager for Danuri, which took more than six years to build and cost 237 billion won ($180 million), to begin revealing insights into aspects of the moon from its ancient magnetism to the “fairytale castles” of dust scattered across its surface. . Researchers also hope the craft, officially called the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, will find hidden sources of water and ice in areas including the permanently cold and dark regions near the poles.

South Korean scientists say the mission will pave the way for the country’s more ambitious plans to land on the moon by 2030. Danuri’s success will ensure future planetary exploration, says Kyeong-ja Kim, a planetary geoscientist at the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources in Daejeon and principal investigator for one of Danuri’s instruments, a gamma spectrometer. “Everyone is so happy and excited,” Kim says, describing the lines of people who waved goodbye to the orbiter  safely packed in a container  on its way to the airport on July 5.

Danuri was flown from South Korea to the United States and is now at Cape Canaveral, Florida, preparing to be placed on a Falcon 9 rocket that will launch it beyond Earth orbit on August 2.”The spacecraft is ready for launch,” says Eunhyeuk Kim, the mission’s project scientist at the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) in Daejeon, but he still sometimes worries whether the team is really ready. “We’ll be checking all systems over and over and over until launch.”Within an hour of launch, the 678-kilogram spacecraft will separate from the rocket and KARI will take control of it, deploy the ship’s solar panels and deploy its satellite dish.

“It’s great to see more and more countries sending up their own orbiters and contributing to the global understanding of what’s happening on the Moon,” says Rachel Klima, a planetary geologist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. , who is part of the scientific team.Danuri will carry five scientific instruments. Among the highlights is PolCam, which will be the first camera in lunar orbit to map the texture of the lunar surface using polarized light. Polarizers are popular for Earth observations, such as those that study vegetation, but have not been sent to study the Moon, Klima says.

 By capturing how light reflects off the lunar surface, PolCam will be able to reveal properties such as the size and density of dust and rock grains. This could help researchers study unusual objects, such as small, porous dust towers called fairy castle structures, Klima says. These structures cannot be reproduced on Earth due to its stronger gravity compared to the Moon, making them difficult to study.

“It’s a breakthrough tool,” says William Farrand, a planetary geologist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who will be working on the PolCam data. Farrand hopes to use the data to study volcanic ash deposits and improve understanding of the moon’s history of explosive eruptions. Another widely anticipated instrument is the ShadowCam, a highly sensitive camera provided by NASA that will take images of the moon’s permanently shadowed regions without sunlight. The camera will have to rely on scattered light, such as that from distant stars, to take images of the surface topography.

Ever since the moon formed, volatile materials like water from comets have been bouncing off its surface and getting stuck in these very cold regions, Klima says. “We have billions of years of solar system history locked in the layers of these cold traps.” By giving researchers a view of the terrain in these areas and identifying brighter areas that could be deposits of ice, ShadowCam will be able to inform future landing missions to study that history, he says.

Scientists hope that data collected by the Danuri Magnetometer (KMAG) will help solve the mystery. The surface of the Moon exhibits highly magnetic regions; these suggest that for hundreds of millions of years in the moon’s past, its core generated a magnetic field almost as strong as Earth’s through a process known as a dynamo, says Ian Garrick-Bethell, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who hopes to interpret KMAG data. But scientists are baffled as to how the Moon’s core, which is much smaller and proportionally farther from the surface than Earth’s, could have powered such an intense dynamo for so long. KMAG will take precise measurements of the Moon’s magnetic field to help them understand.

Garrick-Bethell hopes to fly the probe closer to the moon towards the end of its life to get even better measurements of the magnetic field. “The most exciting science would come if we flew closer to 20 kilometers.”The KARI team has not yet decided whether to shrink Danuri’s orbit and eventually make a crash landing on the moon after completing the one-year mission, says Eunhyeuk Kim. Alternatively, he says, the team could send the capsule into a higher orbit that could see it glide for many more years.

For more read: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02066-3

Read Also:Global Focus: Close security partnership between US President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping

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