Korea agrees with NASA to pursue lunar exploration project

Korea agrees with NASA to pursue lunar exploration project. January. 26, 2012 03:38. uneasy75@donga.com.

The Lunar Impactor project began early last year at the suggestion of NASA, which has shown interest in Korea’s satellite technology.

At first, Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) was hesitant to pursue the project due to the lack of clarity in NASA’s suggestion and the massive budget required. The U.S. space agency, however, persisted and eventually persuaded the Korean space agency to jointly conduct the project. Korea, which plans to begin full-fledged lunar exploration from 2020, judged that cooperation with NASA will provide an opportunity to build experience on lunar exploration and learn from U.S. expertise.

Both sides held talks on the project for the first time in April last year at an international workshop organized by the space exploration task force of Kyung Hee University in Seoul. NASA, which had merely established the concept of the project at the time, sounded out KARI’s opinion on the project.

Since then, the two sides have exchanged opinions by phone and email over several months and signed a concrete deal in November last year, when KARI visited the NASA Ames Research Institute with officials from the Korean Education, Science and Technology Ministry. They discussed each party’s role and the sharing of expenses in detail.

According to NASA, the project will cost a combined 50 million U.S. dollars including for the production of the research spacecraft CubeSat and another spacecraft to carry the former to the moon.

Given that NASA spent 78 million dollars on the LCROSS project, which sent a massive 2.4-ton impactor to the moon in 2009, the Lunar Impactor project is expected to produce important results with a relatively small budget.

Joo Kwang-hyeok, in charge of research on flight vehicles at KARI, said, “The Lunar Impactor project will serve as a golden opportunity to show Korea’s commitment to and technology on lunar exploration to the world.”

The project’s mission is to find clues on how water or ice on the moon was created. The moon had been known as a dry and barren satellite, but India`s first unmanned lunar probe Chandrayaan-1 discovered 600 million tons of water ice in 2008. After the discovery, global space powers that aim to build space stations on the moon began paying keen attention to the celestial body.

Experts take note that water ice was discovered in the moon’s craters. The Indian lunar probe detected ice deposits in more than 40 craters 2 to 9 kilometers in diameter near the moon’s north pole. NASA has also detected at least 95 liters of ice in craters 20 to 30 meters in diameter.

Though magnetic fields on the moon are weaker than those on the Earth, certain craters on the moon have strong magnetic fields. Unlike the Earth, on which magnetic fields are evenly distributed because the planet itself is a huge magnet with north and south poles, the strength of each magnetic field on the moon differs depending on craters. This was discovered by the Lunar Prospector sent by the NASA Ames Research Center in 1998. The probe measured the strength of the moon’s magnetic fields 100 kilometers above it.

The Lunar Impactor’s mission goes beyond that of the Lunar Prospector. The latter measured the moon’s magnetic fields in the skies, but the former will do that near the surface of the moon by dropping CubeSats on the moon’s surface.

Ian Garrick-Bethell, an assistant professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz who is an authority on the moon’s magnetic fields, said, “The Lunar Impactor will take pictures of magnetic fields near the moon’s surface for the first time,” adding, “Hopefully, the project will play a critical role in identifying why water ice was created and what relationship water ice has with the moon’s magnetic fields.”