Last weekend, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spotted something that gave space agency officials pause.
It looked like a surfboard: long, narrow and apparently flat.
However, this space surfboard was not an alien craft. It turned out to be the Korean lunar orbiter Danuri.
On Friday and Saturday, the LRO sent back several photos showing Danuri zooming past, flush against the moon’s crater surface.
This image shows Danuri in the white box. The large bowl-shaped crater visible at the upper left is 12 kilometers wide.
Danuri shot through the LRO, about 5 kilometers closer to the moon than the NASA spacecraft. Its appearance is due to its speed.
The LRO has been orbiting Earth’s moon and taking photos since 2009, when it was NASA’s first lunar mission in a decade.
And it turns out that the spacecraft is in a nearly parallel orbit with Danuri, which was launched in 2022 by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI).
The relative speed of the two objects to each other is a whopping 7,000 miles per hour, so the LRO operations team had to have lightning-fast timing to capture this on camera.
In the end, Danuri looked 10 times longer than he actually is, hence the surfboard appearance.
Although the exposure time of the LRO’s camera was only 0.338 milliseconds, Danuri’s tremendous speed meant that the image still appeared only as a blur, stretched beyond recognition.
During three separate encounters, NASA employees took photos of the object, each time resulting in a surfboard.
Danuri is actually a typical shape of an uncrewed spacecraft: a box in the middle with two solar panels on either side.
Both Danuri and the LRO are designed to take photographs of the moon, capturing images of parts of the moon that are permanently in shadow.