Danuri: Korea's first lunar orbiter Options

[Phil Stooke]

https://www.kari.re.kr/eng/sub03_07_01.do


The link is to the Korean Space Agency's page on Danuri, the nation's first lunar orbiter. It will launch from the US in early August and orbit the Moon for a year. Of particular note is he inclusion of Shadowcam, a US payload modified from the LRO NAC instrument to image in polar shadows. I think I have seen it is 200 times more sensitive that NAC. We can hope for a lot of interesting images of polar areas. Work on a followup lander is in progress but may be slow.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

Another great image from ShadowCam.

https://www.shadowcam.asu.edu/images/1297

This is the central peak of Aristarchus seen by Earthlight. I hadn't thought much about Earthlight imaging before but now I am interested in seeing what some Apollo and other sites would look like.

Phil

[mcaplinger]

I hadn't thought much about Earthlight imaging before...

When we were developing Shadowcam, we tried to come up with ways of having the TDI be selectable so that we could still image on the dayside, but this was just too complex given the constraints of the electronics. So we always asked about Earthlight images, but the SNRs are much poorer than the dimmest permanently-shadowed regions (which you can see in the graininess of the images.) Still, it's better than nothing and a good indication that the system doesn't do too badly even at very low signal levels.

[john_s]

Sweet! I remember seeing Apollo images of Orientale from lunar orbit in Earthlight, much lower resolution and grainier than this one. Probably in one of the Apollo Preliminary Science Reports (Phil would know).

John