In a rare encounter, two lunar spacecraft crossed paths as they orbited the moon in opposite directions. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiteralso known as Danuri, in a series of snaps taken against the moon’s crater background.
The lunar orbiter pair flew past each other between March 5 and 6, moving in nearly parallel orbits around the moon. LRO took a series of photos of Danuri with its narrow-angle camera during three orbits close enough that the orbiter appeared as a blur.
In this first photo, Danuri appears as a dark spot in the lower third. The lunar orbiter is a bit smudged, so you have to squint to find it. At the time the photo was taken, Danuri was reported to be 5 miles (8 kilometers) below LRO’s orbit, while LRO was about 50 miles (80 kilometers) above the lunar surface NASA.
For perspective, this image covers an area approximately 3 kilometers wide.
As they zoomed past each other, the relative speed between the two spacecraft was about 7,200 miles (11,500 kilometers) per hour. Due to the high speed of travel, Danuri appears squished in the photos.
Although the LRO’s camera exposure time was only 0.338 milliseconds, the Danuri spacecraft was still stretched to about 10 times its size and smeared across the image in the opposite direction of its flight direction.
In this image, LRO came a little closer to Danuri at a distance of about 4 kilometers from the spacecraft and was aimed at it at an angle of 25 degrees.
The Danuri orbiter can be seen here in the highlighted white box. To illustrate, the large, bowl-shaped crater at the top left of the image is 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) wide.
This isn’t the first time the lunar orbiter pair has had a celestial photo shoot. About a year ago, Danuri captured a blurry image of LRO as it orbited the moon above NASA’s spacecraft. Now LRO has returned the favor and taken Danuri’s slimming photos.
LRO is the moon’s local paparazzi and takes photos of lunar missions such as: India’s Chandrayaan-3and others that were not as successful as Russia’s Luna 25 lander And Japan’s Hakuto-R M1 lander.
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