• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.51-58
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• 2020

As interest in lunar exploration increases, studies on lunar surface environment simulation including a lunar soil simulant are being conducted. One of the problems when creating a vacuum environment with lunar soil is that it takes long time to reach high vacuum due to outgas from the soil. Most of the outgas is water, and the time to reach high vacuum can be significantly reduced by a pretreatment process that removes moisture adhering to the surface of the lunar soil before putting soil into a vacuum chamber. The existing soil drying methods were examined to determine how these methods were effective to remove moisture from the lunar simulant soil. Drying experiments of lunar soil samples were carried out using a dry oven, a microwave oven, direct heating method and a vacuum oven, and the results of the drying experiment were presented. Drying soil at 110℃ using a dry oven and drying soil by a microwave oven were not enough to remove moisture, and vacuum oven drying method and direct heating drying method at more than 200℃ were effective in water removal.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.327-333
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• 2019

For sustainable lunar exploration, the most required resources should be procured on site because it takes tremendous cost to transfer the resources from the Earth to the Moon. The technologies required for use of lunar resources refers to In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU). As the ISRU technology cannot be verified in the Earth, a lunar surface environment simulator is necessary to be prepared in advance. The Moon has no atmosphere, and the average temperature of the lunar surface reaches to $107^{\circ}C$ during the daytime and $-153^{\circ}C$ at night. The lunar surface is also covered with very fine soils with sharp particles that are electrostatically charged by solar radiation and solar wind. In this research, generation of vacuum environment with lunar soil mass in a chamber and simulation of electrostatically charged soils are taken into consideration. It was successful to make a vacuum environment of a chamber including lunar soils without soil disturbance by controlling evacuation rate of a vacuum chamber. And an experiment procedure for simulating the charged lunar soil was suggested by theoretical consideration in charging phenomena on lunar dust.

• Journal of Positioning, Navigation, and Timing
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.335-342
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• 2023

Lunar Navigation Satellite System refers to a constellation of satellite providing PNT services on the moon. LNSS consists of main satellite and navigation satellites. Navigation satellites orbiting around the moon and a main satellite moves the area between the moon and the L2 point. The navigation satellite performs the same role as the Earth's GNSS satellite, and the main satellite communicates with the Earth for time synchronization. Due to the effect of the non-uniform shape of the moon, it is necessary to focus on the influence of the lunar gravitational field when designing the orbit simulation for navigation satellite. Since the main satellite is farther away from the moon than the navigation satellite, both the earth's gravity and the moon's gravity must be considered simultaneously when designing the orbit simulation for main satellite. Therefore, the main satellite orbit simulation must be designed through the three-body problem between the Earth, the moon, and the main satellite. In this paper, the orbit simulation tool for main satellite and navigation satellite required for LNSS was designed. The orbit simulation considers the environment characteristics of the moon. As a result of comparing long-term data (180 days) with the commercial program GMAT, it was confirmed that there was an error of about 1 m.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.26-34
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• 2019

In this paper, a coarse lunar soil model is developed using discrete element method and its computed physical properties are compared with those of the actual lunar soil for its validation. The surface of the actual moon consists of numerous craters and rocks of various sizes, and it is covered with fine dry soil which seriously affects the landing stability of the lunar lander. Therefore, in consideration of the environment of the lunar regolith, the lunar soil is realized using discrete element method. To validate the coarse model of lunar soil, the simulations of the indentation test and the direct shear test are performed to check the physical properties(indentation depth, cohesion stress, internal friction angle). To examine the performance of the proposed model, the drop simulation of finite element model of single-leg landing gear is performed on proposed soil models with different particle diameters. The impact load delivered to the strut of the lander is compared to test results.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.38 no.12
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• pp.125-134
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• 2022

The Global Expansion Roadmap published by the International Space Exploration Coordination Group, which is organized by space agencies around the world, presents future lunar exploration guidance and stresses a lunar habitat program to utilize lunar resources. The Moon attracts attention as an outpost for deep space exploration. Simulating lunar surface environments is required to evaluate the performances of various equipment for future lunar surface missions. In this paper, an experimental study was conducted to simulate high vacuum pressure and cryogenic temperature of the permanent shadow regions in the lunar south pole, which is a promising candidate for landing and outpost construction. The establishment of an efficient dirty thermal vacuum chamber (DTVC) operation process has never been presented. One-dimensional ground cooling tests were conducted with various vacuum pressures with the Korean Lunar Simulant type-1 (KLS-1) in DTVC. The most advantageous vacuum pressure was found to be 30-80 mbar, considering the cooling efficiency and equipment stability. However, peripheral cooling is also required to simulate a cryogenic for not sublimating ice in a high vacuum pressure. In this study, an efficient peripheral cooling operation process was proposed by applying the frost ratio concept.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.69-75
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• 2011

As part of its space development program, Korea has a plan for the launch of a lunar orbiter and a lunar lander. To enable the transmission of lunar information based on multimedia, it is necessary to construct a communication system that is capable of transmitting large-volume telemetry data. The CCSDS standard recommends the deferred NAK mode as ARQ scheme for reliable long-distance deep-space communication systems. In this paper, we implement a space communication system simulator in the deferred NAK mode using models of the lunar orbiter, the earth station, and the space environment. The simulator employs modulation techniques and turbo coding schemes for transmitting large-volume telemetry data. We analyze the transmission performance of telemetry data through the simulation.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
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• v.34 no.2
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• pp.139-151
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• 2017

This paper presents an overview of deep space orbit determination software (DSODS), as well as validation and verification results on its event prediction capabilities. DSODS was developed in the MATLAB object-oriented programming environment to support the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) mission. DSODS has three major capabilities: celestial event prediction for spacecraft, orbit determination with deep space network (DSN) tracking data, and DSN tracking data simulation. To achieve its functionality requirements, DSODS consists of four modules: orbit propagation (OP), event prediction (EP), data simulation (DS), and orbit determination (OD) modules. This paper explains the highest-level data flows between modules in event prediction, orbit determination, and tracking data simulation processes. Furthermore, to address the event prediction capability of DSODS, this paper introduces OP and EP modules. The role of the OP module is to handle time and coordinate system conversions, to propagate spacecraft trajectories, and to handle the ephemerides of spacecraft and celestial bodies. Currently, the OP module utilizes the General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT) as a third-party software component for high-fidelity deep space propagation, as well as time and coordinate system conversions. The role of the EP module is to predict celestial events, including eclipses, and ground station visibilities, and this paper presents the functionality requirements of the EP module. The validation and verification results show that, for most cases, event prediction errors were less than 10 millisec when compared with flight proven mission analysis tools such as GMAT and Systems Tool Kit (STK). Thus, we conclude that DSODS is capable of predicting events for the KPLO in real mission applications.

• Proceedings of the Korea Inteligent Information System Society Conference
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• 2001.01a
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• pp.145-150
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• 2001

A Controlled Ecological Life Support System(CELSS) is essential for man to live a long time in a closed space such as a lunar base or a mars base. Such a system may be an extremely complex system that has a lot of facilities and circulates multiple substances,. Therefore, it is very difficult task to control the whole CELSS. Thus by regarding facilities constituting the CELSS as agents and regarding the status and action as information, the whole CELSS can be treated as multi-agent system(MAS). If a CELSS can be regarded as MAS the CELSS can have three advantages with the MAS. First the MAS need not have a central computer. Second the expendability of the CELSS increases. Third, its fault tolerance rises. However it is difficult to describe the cooperation protocol among agents for MAS. Therefore in this study we propose to apply reinforcement learning (RL), because RL enables and agent to acquire a control rule automatically. To prove that MAS and RL are effective methods. we have created the system in Java, which easily gives a distributed environment that is the characteristics feature of an agent. In this paper, we report the simulation results for material circulation control of the CELSS by the MAS and RL.

• Journal of Korean Society of Coastal and Ocean Engineers
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.381-389
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• 2012

An EST-based method which is applicable for estimating extreme sea levels from short sea-level records in a tide dominated coastal zone was developed. Via the method, annual maximum tidal level is chosen from the simulated 1-yr tidal data which are constituted by the independent daily high water levels, short term and long term surge heights and typhoon-induced surge heights. The high water levels are generated considering not only spring/neap tides and annual tide but also 18.6-year lunar nodal cycle. Typhoon-induced surges are selected from the training set which is constructed by observed or simulated surge heights. This yearly simulation is repeated many hundred years to yield the extreme tidal levels, and the whole process is carried out many hundred times repeatedly to get robust statistics of the levels. In addition, validation of the method is also shown by comparing the result with other researches with the tidal data of Mokpo Harbor.