• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
• /
• v.41 no.1
• /
• pp.43-60
• /
• 2024

Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) is South Korea's first space exploration mission, developed by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute. It aims to develop technologies for lunar exploration, explore lunar science, and test new technologies. KPLO was launched on August 5, 2022, by a Falcon-9 launch vehicle from cape canaveral space force station (CCSFS) in the United States and placed on a ballistic lunar transfer (BLT) trajectory. A total of four trajectory correction maneuvers were performed during the approximately 4.5-month trans-lunar cruise phase to reach the Moon. Starting with the first lunar orbit insertion (LOI) maneuver on December 16, the spacecraft performed a total of three maneuvers before arriving at the lunar mission orbit, at an altitude of 100 kilometers, on December 27, 2022. After entering lunar orbit, the commissioning phase validated the operation of the mission mode, in which the payload is oriented toward the center of the Moon. After completing about one month of commissioning, normal mission operations began, and each payload successfully performed its planned mission. All of the spacecraft operations that KPLO performs from launch to normal operations were designed through the system operations design process. This includes operations that are automatically initiated post-separation from the launch vehicle, as well as those in lunar transfer orbit and lunar mission orbit. Key operational procedures such as the spacecraft's initial checkout, trajectory correction maneuvers, LOI, and commissioning were developed during the early operation preparation phase. These procedures were executed effectively during both the early and normal operation phases. The successful execution of these operations confirms the robust verification of the system operation.

• Journal of Satellite, Information and Communications
• /
• v.6 no.1
• /
• pp.1-5
• /
• 2011

In recent space industry, It has become a major trend to launch lunar exploration satellites to extend activities in the deep space environment. In this paper, a link budget analysis is carried out for the lunar exploration satellite. One of the major difference between the lunar satellite and LEO spacecraft lies in the orbit parameters. The vast distance between spacecraft and the Earth station imposes a challenging task for the spacecraft designers in terms of achieving stable communication link budget. The satellite tool kit software has been adopted to simulate the lunar exploring satellite. The relative distance between the spacecraft and the ground stations are tracked and the communication link budget is calculated accordingly.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
• /
• v.51 no.10
• /
• pp.50-54
• /
• 2014

Evaluation of the possible or probable effects of environmental conditions which are temperature, radiation, dust as well as other possibilities in terms of meteoroids, seismicity, and no global magnetic field has been carried out for wireless communications on the lunar surface in this paper. The results considered in this paper can be utilized as a basic information on making efficient use of the design for wireless communications system in Korean lunar exploration project.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
• /
• v.40 no.4
• /
• pp.149-171
• /
• 2023

ShadowCam is a National Aeronautics and Space Administration Advanced Exploration Systems funded instrument hosted onboard the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) satellite. By collecting high-resolution images of permanently shadowed regions (PSRs), ShadowCam will provide critical information about the distribution and accessibility of water ice and other volatiles at spatial scales (1.7 m/pixel) required to mitigate risks and maximize the results of future exploration activities. The PSRs never see direct sunlight and are illuminated only by light reflected from nearby topographic highs. Since secondary illumination is very dim, ShadowCam was designed to be over 200 times more sensitive than previous imagers like the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera Narrow Angle Camera (LROC NAC). ShadowCam images thus allow for unprecedented views into the shadows, but saturate while imaging sunlit terrain.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
• /
• v.40 no.3
• /
• pp.123-129
• /
• 2023

This paper presents an analysis of the trans-lunar trajectory insertion performance of the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), the first lunar exploration spacecraft of the Republic of Korea. The successful launch conducted on August 4, 2022 (UTC), utilized the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The trans-lunar trajectory insertion performance plays a crucial role in ensuring the overall mission success by directly influencing the spacecraft's onboard fuel consumption. Following separation from the launch vehicle (LV), a comprehensive analysis of the trajectory insertion performance was performed by the KPLO flight dynamics (FD) team. Both orbit parameter message (OPM) and orbit determination (OD) solutions were employed using deep space network (DSN) tracking measurements. As a result, the KPLO was accurately inserted into the ballistic lunar transfer (BLT) trajectory, satisfying all separation requirements at the target interface point (TIP), including launch injection energy per unit mass (C3), right ascension of the injection orbit apoapsis vector (RAV), and declination of the injection orbit apoapsis vector (DAV). The precise BLT trajectory insertion facilitated the smoother operation of the KPLO's remainder mission phase and enabled the utilization of reserved fuel, consequently significantly enhancing the possibilities of an extended mission.

• Journal of Astronomy and Space Sciences
• /
• v.32 no.3
• /
• pp.247-256
• /
• 2015

In this work, an efficient method with which to evaluate the high-degree-and-order gravitational harmonics of the non-sphericity of a central body is described and applied to state predictions of a lunar orbiter. Unlike the work of Song et al. (2010), which used a conventional computation method to process gravitational harmonic coefficients, the current work adapted a well-known recursion formula that directly uses fully normalized associated Legendre functions to compute the acceleration due to the non-sphericity of the moon. With the formulated algorithms, the states of a lunar orbiting satellite are predicted and its performance is validated in comparisons with solutions obtained from STK/Astrogator. The predicted differences in the orbital states between STK/Astrogator and the current work all remain at a position of less than 1 m with velocity accuracy levels of less than 1 mm/s, even with different orbital inclinations. The effectiveness of the current algorithm, in terms of both the computation time and the degree of accuracy degradation, is also shown in comparisons with results obtained from earlier work. It is expected that the proposed algorithm can be used as a foundation for the development of an operational flight dynamics subsystem for future lunar exploration missions by Korea. It can also be used to analyze missions which require very close operations to the moon.

• Korean Journal of Remote Sensing
• /
• v.28 no.6
• /
• pp.693-704
• /
• 2012

Space-born remote sensing camera systems tend to be developed to have very high performances. They are developed to provide extremely small ground sample distance, wide swath width, and good MTF (Modulation Transfer Function) at the expense of big volume, massive weight, and big power consumption. Therefore, the camera system occupies relatively big portion of the satellite bus from the point of mass and volume. However, the camera systems for lunar exploration don't need to have such high performances. Instead, it should be versatile for various usages under various operating environments. It should be light and small and should consume small power. In order to be used for national program of lunar exploration, electro-optical versatile camera system, called MAEPLE (Multi-Application Electro-Optical Payload for Lunar Exploration), has been designed after the derivation of camera system requirements. A ground model of the camera system has been manufactured to identify and secure relevant key technologies. The ground model was mounted on an aircraft and checked if the basic design concept would be valid and versatile functions implemented on the camera system would worked properly. In this paper, results of design and functional test performed with the field campaigns and air-born imaging are introduced.

• Journal of Aerospace System Engineering
• /
• v.11 no.2
• /
• pp.30-34
• /
• 2017

This paper is concerned with product assurance for the secondary payload, which is used for technology and science research, in the satellite system, which consists primarily of the spacecraft and the primary payload (a high-resolution optical camera). The Korean satellite development program has successfully insured the safety of the spacecraft and primary payload. However, given the limits of budget and schedule, it is very important to establish adequate product assurance for the secondary payload, which has a lower priority than the spacecraft or primary payload. This paper studies the concept of product assurance for the secondary payload of technological and scientific equipment.

• The Journal of the Petrological Society of Korea
• /
• v.26 no.4
• /
• pp.373-384
• /
• 2017

A new era with the $4^{th}$ Industrial Revolution certainly brings new opportunities for human to explore human's activities outside of the Earth. After the Apollo program, exploration for lunar resources and establishment of lunar base seem to be in reality. This could be due to new findings by the LCROSS and LRO proving the advanced scientific development and new scientific results about the moon from Asian countries including China with Chang'E missions. It is expected that fossil fuels will be in shortage in the near future and at this time, Helium-3 could be an energy resource as a replacement of the fossil fuels. At present it is well known that countries like Russia, USA, and Europe will continue to investigate on lunar exploration especially with landers toward future human activities on the moon to establish a lunar base. With this point of view, it is important for human to understand lunar resources and prepare for prospective utilization of lunar resources. This review paper considers on a point of view in both lunar resource exploration and establishment of lunar base.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
• /
• v.46 no.6
• /
• pp.479-486
• /
• 2018

In order to ensure reliable navigation performance of a lunar exploration rover, navigation algorithms using additional sensors such as inertial measurement units and cameras are essential on lunar surface in the absence of a global navigation satellite system. Unprecedentedly, Visual Odometry (VO) using a stereo camera has been successfully implemented at the US Mars rovers. In this paper, we estimate the 6-DOF pose of the lunar exploration rover from gray images of a lunar-like terrains. The proposed algorithm estimates relative pose of consecutive images by sparse image alignment based semi-direct VO. In order to overcome vulnerability to non-linearity of direct VO, we add adaptive motion prior weights calculated from a linear function of the previous pose to the optimization cost function. The proposed algorithm is verified in lunar-like terrain dataset recorded by Toronto University reflecting the characteristics of the actual lunar environment.