NASA spacecraft captured the moment the Korean ship flew in the opposite direction

NASA's lunar probe captured the moment Danuri, a South Korean spacecraft operating in a nearly parallel orbit, whizzed by.

NASA released a series of images recording Danuri or KPLO, a lunar orbiter operated by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, flying over the Moon's surface at high speed, Newsweek reported on April 9. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured these images on March 5-6, when the two spacecraft moved in nearly parallel but opposite orbits.

The LRO ship pointed its camera down to take pictures of the Danuri ship while flying about 5km higher. (Photo: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University).

In a series of newly released black and white photos, Danuri looks like a blurred line cutting across the Moon's surface. These photos were taken by the LRO operations team at Goddard Space Flight Center using a narrow-angle camera when the spacecraft approached Danuri close enough.

Even when the camera's exposure time is very short, the image of Danuri is still blurred 10 times its real size in the opposite direction due to the very high relative speed between the two spacecraft, about 11,500 km/h. This speed requires the operations team to have very delicate timing so that the camera turns in the right direction at the right time.

"To be clear, the Danuri orbiter isn't a weird, slender blob of pixels - it's a fairly normal-looking orbiter. However, its tremendous speed causes it to appear blurry in LRO's cameras , " Paul Byrne , associate professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Washington University St. Louis, explains.

LRO was launched by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 2009 to study the Moon's surface and answer basic questions about the origin and evolution of this celestial body along with Earth. LRO's orbit is located at an altitude of about 50 km above the Moon's surface.

Meanwhile, Danuri was launched from the US on a SpaceX rocket in August 2022. The spacecraft helps test the technologies needed to reach and explore the Moon. It will measure magnetic forces on the Moon's surface, evaluate resources and map the terrain to help select future landing sites. Danuri orbits the Moon with an orbital period of about two hours.