The launch date of Korea’s first lunar probe, Danuri (KPLO), is approaching in regarding a week. If preliminary inspections and standing work are carried out without any problems, it will launch next week and begin its journey to the moon. Following the Nuri, which was developed with pure proprietary technology, attention is being paid to whether it will be named as the world’s 7th lunar exploration country with the success of Danuri this time.
According to the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KAERI) on the 27th, Danuri was at launch pad 40 at Cape Canaveral, Fla. It will be launched into space on a Falcon-9 launch vehicle.
The first communication takes place 60 minutes following launch. About 60 minutes following launch, Danuri starts communicating with the Earth’s ground station for the first time using the S-Band.
Launch site 39A, where Apollo 11 was launched, has been designated as a reserve launch site in case there is a problem with Launcher 40 before launch.
On the 5th of this month, Danuri was transported to the US launch site in a special container capable of maintaining temperature, humidity and positive pressure and absorbing shock. Afterwards, system inspection, propellant polarity test, S-band communication test, and oil leak test were completed.
Currently, the development team is busy confirming the final shape of the Danuri, mounting it on the fairing module, and then combining the fairing module with the projectile once more.
The date Danuri enters lunar orbit is December 16. Lunar transition orbit design in preparation for launch date fluctuations, regardless of the launch date during the launch preparatory period (until September 9), which is not the original scheduled date, it will enter the lunar orbit (December 16) and enter the mission orbit schedule (December 31). day) is the same.
Instead of moving directly to the moon, Danuri plans to approach the moon in a ‘butterfly shape’ in a certain orbit. This is called the ‘ballistic lunar transition method’ (BLT). The advantage of using the BLT method is that fuel consumption can be minimized by using the gravity of the celestial body to obtain propulsion and momentum.
As a result, the lifespan of the mission is also extended. However, communication between Earth and Danuri may be difficult because it navigates a much longer distance.
When Danuri enters lunar orbit following regarding four and a half months of navigation, it will perform various scientific missions through six types of scientific equipment for one year. Danurier includes a total of 5 types of equipment developed in Korea, including high-resolution cameras (Anti Incidents), wide-field polarization cameras (Cheonmunyeon), magnetic field measuring instruments (Kyunghee University), gamma-ray spectroscopy (Jijayeon), and Space Internet (ETRI), as well as a total of 5 types of equipment developed by NASA. ‘Shadow Cam’ is released. Each of these payloads will perform a variety of scientific missions, such as mapping the lunar surface, surveying lunar resources, and searching for potential lunar landing sites in South Korea.
In the space internet device developed by ETRI, the song ‘Dynamite’ of the group BTS is also stored, attracting attention. The space internet equipment will reproduce this file and perform a test to transmit it to Earth.
Danuri wears black clothes and travels through space. In deep space exploration, it is inevitably sensitive to electrostatic charging and discharging due to the influence of cosmic radiation.
To protect Danuri, the research team added a ‘Black Kapton’ layer with excellent electrical conductivity to the outermost layer of the multi-layered thin-film insulation. All of this is black.