With lunar orbiter, South Korea will join a revived race to explore the Moon

If all goes well next week, South Korea will join the small number of countries to have sent spacecraft to the Moon—and scientists around the world are looking forward to the results. The Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) carries “a cadre of instruments that will yield important information about the Moon,” says Clive Neal, a lunar scientist at the University of Notre Dame who is not involved in the mission. The $200 million KPLO will launch on a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket from Cape Canaveral on 2 August. It should enter a polar orbit 100 kilometers above the lunar surface and conduct observations for at least a year. South Korea is eying the Moon after having put more than a dozen communications, weather, and Earth-observing satellites into Earth orbit. “We want to develop critical technology for space exploration as well as for scientific investigation,” says Eunhyuk Kim, project scientist for KPLO’s developer, the Korean Aerospace Research Institute (KARI). In 2016, after nearly a decade of planning for a Moon orbiter, KARI called for payload proposals, later selecting four from Korean teams and setting aside space for one from NASA, which has contributed technical support to the mission. (A sixth payload will test communications technologies.) The KPLO payload breaking new ground in lunar observations is the Wide-Angle Polarimetric Camera (PolCam), which will catch the polarization of sunlight reflected at various angles from lunar surface p...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news