• Current Industrial and Technological Trends in Aerospace
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.119-129
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• 2011

The soft landing of a lunar lander after the entrance of lunar orbit is an essential prerequisite for the accomplishment of the lander's lunar mission. During the landing process of a lunar lander, efficient shock absorption and stability maintenance are indispensible technology to protect payloads. Therefore, the landing gear is a crucial structural component of a lunar lander, it has to absorb the kinetic energy associated with touchdown and support the static load of the landing module in an upright position. In this paper, various landing gears of lunar landers which are being developed as well as which had been successfully landed on the moon surface are investigated. In the end, the Korean lunar lander, which is being designed for preliminary development model, is presented as an example of the lunar lander development.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.39 no.6
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• pp.13-19
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• 2023

Lunar ice is a resource available for future human exploration in deep space and long-term extraterrestrial habitat. However, the origin and nature of lunar ice remains unclear. In addition to remote sensing, international space agencies are competitively planning and conducting missions for lunar surface exploration to determine the existence and resource extent of lunar ice. If a sufficient amount of lunar ice is confirmed, its future in-situ resource utilization is expected to be greatly beneficial. However, due to ice extraction, settlement may occur, which should be taken into account from a geotechnical engineering perspective. Herein, experimental investigations of the potential settlement caused by lunar ice extraction were conducted and different textures of lunar ice were simulated. Consequently, it was confirmed that significant settlement occurs even at the initial water content of ~10% in lunar regolith simulant-ice-mixed soil.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.271-277
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• 2016

For a stable electric power supply in the space, nuclear batteries have been used as the main power source in a spacecraft owing to their long lifetime and high reliability. In accordance with the plan for lunar mission in Korea, nuclear batteries will supply electricity to the rover that needs to be developed. According to the information about the estimated payload, Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute started with the conceptual design based on the previous studies in USA and Russia. Because a nuclear battery converts the decay heat of the radioisotope into electricity, thermal design, radiation shield, and shock protection need to be considered. In this study, two types of nuclear batteries, radial type and axial type, were designed according to the alignment of the thermoelectric module. Heat transfer analyses were performed to compare their thermoelectric efficiency, and test mockups were fabricated to evaluate their performances.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.45 no.9
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• pp.734-745
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• 2017

The navigation system of lunar lander are composed of various navigation sensors which have a complementary characteristics such as inertial measurement unit, star tracker, altimeter, velocimeter, and camera for terrain relative navigation to achieve the precision and autonomous navigation capability. The required performance of sensors has to be determined according to the landing scenario and mission requirement. In this paper, the specifications of navigation sensors are investigated through covariance analysis. The reference error model with 77 state vector and measurement model are derived for covariance analysis. The mission requirement is categorized as precision exploration with 90m($3{\sigma}$ ) landing accuracy and area exploration with 6km($3{\sigma}$ ), and the landing scenario is divided into PDI(Powered descent initiation) and DOI(Deorbit initiation) scenario according to the beginning of autonomous navigation. The required specifications of the navigation sensors are derived by analyzing the performance according to the sensor combination and landing scenario.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.46 no.2
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• pp.57.2-57.2
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• 2021

An asteroid is important for understanding the condition of our solar system in early-stage because an asteroid, considered as a building block of the solar system, preserves the information when our solar system was formed. It has been continuously flowing into the near-Earth space, and then some asteroids have a probability of impacting Earth. Some asteroids have valuable minerals and volatiles for future resources in space activity. Korean government clarified, in the 3rd promotion plan for space activity, an asteroid sample return mission by the mid-2030s. However, it is almost impossible to do so based on only a single experience of an exploration mission to the Moon, Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, which will be launched in mid-2022. We propose a Rendezvous Mission to Apophis(RMA), beneficial in terms of science, impact hazardous, resource, and technical readiness for the space exploration of Korea.

• Aerospace Engineering and Technology
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.108-119
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• 2014

In this paper, through the example of international lunar exploration mission the equipment was to investigate, and the amount of data transferred per day were identified. Data storage and the data transfer rate (8.4Mbps less) for the satisfaction of the value within the range of available S and X bands was confirmed by using the communication link budget. The result is to define the range of the sensor information can be obtained, as well as from the values of the parameters calculated for the transmission communication systems will be able to define the specifications.

• The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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• v.42 no.2
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• pp.89.2-89.2
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• 2017

Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) is a first Korean Lunar exploration mission. KPLO is equipped with four payloads in Korea and one payload in United States. KMAG is one of Korean payloads to measure the Moon's magnetic field. Moon has a no dipole magnetic field such as earth's global magnetic field. But there are many curious crustal magnetic anomalies. these features still do not well understood. This is a main scientific objective of KMAG payload and the study of space environment around moon is a second objective. KMAG has three magnetometers which are mounted in the edge of the 1.2 meter boom. This paper shows a KMAG's requirements, instrument description, and a preliminary function test results.

• Korean Journal of Mineralogy and Petrology
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• v.34 no.1
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• pp.83-93
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• 2021

NASA has a plan for the Artemis manned lunar mission in 2020. In 2030s, not only America but also other countries are considering to prepare for human to stay on the Moon at least for a month and necessary technology is currently being developed. With this plan, the mostly considered thing is lunar in-situ resource utilization. The most essential resources could be water and oxygen for sustain human life on the Moon. These resources are not supposed to be brought from the Earth, and it is economically sensible if they are obtained from the lunar surface. Because oxygen can be used as both oxidizer and propellent when a rocket departs from a lunar base directly to Mars, technology for extraction method of oxygen resource and its utilization has been being developed worldwide. This paper introduces oxygen distribution on the Moon and major oxygen extraction methods.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.45 no.9
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• pp.746-756
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• 2017

An algorithm is developed to generate measurement data of deep space network for Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) mission. The algorithm can provide corrected measurement data for the Orbit Determination (OD) module in deep space. This study describes how to generate the computed data such as range, Doppler, azimuth angle and elevation angle. The geometric data were obtained by General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT) simulation and the corrected data were calculated with measurement models. Therefore, the result of total delay includes effects of tropospheric delay, ionospheric delay, charged particle delay, antenna offset delay, and tropospheric refraction delay. The computed measurement data were validated by comparison with the results from Orbit Determination ToolBoX (ODTBX).

• 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.