South Korea’s First Mission to the Moon Launched Today

The Danuri, a South Korean rocket, uses six different instruments on its mission to the moon.

REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, SEOUL — First mission South Korea to the moon, the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) was launched Thursday (4/8/2022). The launch is on a mission to explore magnetic anomalies, search for future landing sites, and sniff out rare elements on the moon.

The spacecraft, also known as ‘Danuri’—a combination of the Korean words meaning ‘moon’ and ‘enjoy’—is currently scheduled to launch on August 4 at 7:08 p.m. EDT aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Upon arrival on the moon, Danuri will entered the lunar polar orbit and sailed above the surface at an altitude of 60 miles (100 kilometers).

Danuri will not only be a pioneer for Korean space exploration, with further missions to follow, but will also use six different instruments to perform important science during its years of operation around the moon. Among other topics, it will focus on puzzling the moon’s magnetism, searching for water ice in permanently shadowed craters and testing new experiments designed to improve communication dropouts.

Among instruments Danuri is a magnetic field detector called KMAG, which will measure the strength of the magnetic field in the moon’s crust. Scientists hope to learn more about the origin of this field, and perhaps to find further clues about the circumstances surrounding the formation of the moon 4.5 billion years ago.

Scientists know that Earth’s magnetic field is produced by the dynamo effect, in which a layer of molten iron that conducts electricity in a rotating core generates an electric field that induces the resulting magnetic field. But today, the moon’s core is solid.

“We expected that such an environment existed in the mid-moon region at the time of its formation,” Eunhyeuk Kim, project scientist for Danuri at KARI, Korea Aerospace Research Institute, told Space.com in an email interview. point.”

In most regions of the moon, all that remains now are a few traces of magnetism, but there are certain areas where there is a very strong magnetism, compared to the rest of the moon. These locations are called lunar magnetic anomalies, and scientists aren’t sure how they formed.

Some magnetic anomalies occur in the bright ‘moon rotation’, which is an unusual surface feature, with a ‘squiggly’ shape. Scientists think the eddies may be somehow related to magnetism, perhaps because magnetic anomalies mark the ancient impacts of metal-rich asteroids that left their magnetic material buried beneath the lunar surface.