[ad_1]
The week that just ended saw several launches of space rockets (including a manned sub-orbital mission thanks to Blue Origin and a Chinese experimental space plane). However, one of the missions that will reach the greatest distance is that of the South Korean probe Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter or KPLO which is directed towards the moon thanks to a Falcon 9 rocket of SpaceX.
Elon Musk’s company supplied the rocket (already used in the past) to allow the Asian nation to begin the study of our natural satellite thanks to a orbiter. It is also a probe that will be able to provide useful information for future Artemis missions wanted by the consortium of international agencies led by NASA (whose first launch should take place by the end of this month with Artemis I).
SpaceX launches the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter probe towards the Moon
The space rocket with the probe it left at 1:08 am on 5 August (Italian time) from Launch Complex 40 in Cape Canaveral in Florida. This is South Korea’s first lunar orbiter and therefore a great achievement for the nation and demonstrates once again how more and more countries are interested in Space and in particular in moon.
As usual, the first stage of this Falcon 9 from SpaceX it had already been used for other missions in the past: Arabsat-6A, STP-2, COSMO-SkyMed FM2 and for two Starlink missions. Again the first stage landed on one droneship (Just Read the Instructions, JRTI) approximately nine minutes after take-off and will be used for future launches. This was also possible thanks to the relatively low mass of KPLOequal to 678 kg.
The South Korean orbiter will be able to use six tools built into it: for example a high-sensitivity camera called ShadowCam (provided by NASA) who will scan the permanently shadowed lunar craters at the poles for ice. There is also a spectrometer (KGRS) for gamma rays to detect gamma-ray bursts from Space. KMAG instead it is a magnetometer that will detect the magnetic fields between the Earth and the Moon. LUTI is a camera designed to take high-resolution photographs of the lunar surface while PolCam will study the polarimetric properties of the lunar surface. Then there is a satellite communication system (Disruption Tolerant Network Experiment Payload) to demonstrate the potential of new types of connections in Deep Space.
The second stage of the space rocket from SpaceX continued to push the orbiter to exploit a called orbit ballistic lunar transfer orbit which allows to have a lower propellant consumption but lengthening the time needed to reach the moon. It is an orbit that was also used for NASA’s CAPSTONE (which, however, used an Electron rocket from Rocket Lab).
Currently the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter it is directed towards the Lagrange point L1 about 1.5 million km from the Earth and then returns, thanks to gravitational forces, towards the natural satellite of our planet. The lunar orbit is expected to be reached around December 16, and by December 31, it should have a circular orbit about 100 km from the surface. The voyage is followed thanks to NASA’s Deep Space Network (and a South Korean antenna system). The ultimate aim is to collect even more data on the Moon but also to plan the landing of a South Korean lander in the 1930s.
Gift ideas, why waste time and risk making mistakes?
GIVE A GOOD AMAZON!
.
[ad_2]
Source link
