South Korea Launch Scouts the Moon, With More Missions to Come - The New York Times

The Danuri spacecraft, which launched on Thursday, aims to provide a lunar scientific bounty while preparing the country’s small space program for future exploration.

South Korea’s lunar spacecraft, named Danuri, was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida, setting out on a roundabout but fuel-efficient path that will have it arriving at the moon in mid-December.

Originally known as the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, the mission was given the name Danuri after it became the winning entry in a naming contest.

Kwon said the main goal of the Danuri mission was to develop basic technologies like the design of orbital trajectories, deep space navigation, a high-thrust propulsion system and a 35-meter antenna to communicate with distant spacecraft.

But the spacecraft’s scientific payload is sophisticated, and will aid scientists in South Korea and globally in studying the moon’s magnetic field, measuring its quantities of elements and molecules like uranium, water and helium-3 and photographing the dark craters at the lunar poles, where the sun never shines.

The moon’s interior no longer generates a magnetic field, but it once did, and that primordial field is preserved in lava flows that hardened during this era.

Ian Garrick-Bethell, a professor of planetary science at the University of California, Santa Cruz and a participating scientist on the Danuri mission, said that the early magnetic field appears to have been surprisingly strong — potentially even as much as double the strength of Earth’s current magnetic field.

He is hoping that after the spacecraft’s primary mission of one year is complete, South Korea could choose to move Danuri much closer to the moon’s surface, within 12 miles or less, where the magnetometer could get a much better look at the magnetized rocks.

The rise and fall in the strength of the magnetic field in the solar wind induces electric currents in the moon, and those electric currents in turn generate magnetic fields that will be measured by Danuri.

The characteristics of the magnetic field will give hints of the structure and composition of the moon’s interior.

This work also requires combining measurements with those made by two NASA spacecraft, THEMIS-ARTEMIS P1 and P2, which travel around the moon on highly elliptical orbits, so they can measure the changes in the solar wind while Danuri measures the induced magnetic fields closer to the surface.

The Danuri’s device can pick up a wider spectrum of lower energy gamma rays than similar instruments on earlier lunar missions, “and this range is full of new information to detect elements on the moon,” said Naoyuki Yamashita, a New Mexico-based scientist who works for the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona.

Because radon is a gas, it could travel from the moon’s interior to its surface.

The Korean Aerospace Research Institute, South Korea’s equivalent of NASA, will use Danuri’s high-resolution camera to scout the lunar surface for potential sites for a robotic lander mission in 2031, Mr.

Jean-Pierre Williams, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and another participating scientist in the Danuri mission, is hoping to produce detailed temperature maps of the craters by combining the ShadowCam images with data gathered by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

NASA’s orbiter, which has been studying the moon since 2009, carries an instrument that records temperatures of the lunar surface.