Joining the list of nations with ambitious plans in space, South Korea is aiming for the moon on Thursday.
Its first lunar spacecraft, named Danuri, is carrying scientific payload that will study the moon’s magnetic field, measure quantities of elements and molecules like uranium, water and helium-3, and photograph the dark craters at the poles where the sun never shines.
When is the launch, and how can I watch it?
Danuri will be carried to orbit by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Liftoff is scheduled for 7:08 p.m. Eastern time. SpaceX will provide brief coverage of the launch beginning at 7 p.m., which you can watch in the video player embedded above. The South Korean space agency will also provide a Korean-language livestream.
Weather forecasts give an 80 percent probability of favorable conditions. If needed, SpaceX has an additional launch opportunity on Friday.
What is Danuri, and what will it study?
Originally known as the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, the mission has now been given the name of Danuri, a portmanteau of the Korean words for “moon” and “enjoy.” It will be South Korea’s first space mission to go beyond low-Earth orbit.
Its scientific instruments include a magnetometer, a gamma-ray spectrometer and three cameras. NASA supplied one of the cameras, ShadowCam, which is sensitive enough to pick up the few photons that bounce off the terrain into the moon’s dark, permanently shadowed craters. These craters, located at the moon’s poles, remain forever cold, below minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit, and contain water ice that has accumulated over the eons.
The ice could provide a frozen history of the 4.5 billion-year the solar system and a bounty of resources for future visiting astronauts. Such ice can also be extracted and melted to provide water and broken apart into oxygen and hydrogen, which would provide both air to breathe for astronauts and rocket propellants for travelers looking to launch from the moon to other destinations.
What else has South Korea done in space?
South Korea is developing its own rockets. Its first design, Naro-1, successfully reached orbit on the third try, in 2013. Since then, the Korea Aerospace Research Institute — South Korea’s equivalent of NASA — has shifted its efforts to Nuri, a larger, three-stage rocket. The second Nuri flight in June successfully placed several satellites in orbit.
South Korea has several communications and earth observation satellites in low-Earth orbit. It also has an extensive military missile program.
