NASA announced on March 30 that it has selected nine scientists to participate in South Korea’s Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) mission, scheduled for launch next August. The Americans are being added through the Participating Scientists Program, according to NASA, “to expand the scientific return of the KPLO mission.” South Korea has never had a spacecraft go beyond Earth orbit. This will be the first encounter with “live data” from the Moon.
The three goals are realizing the mission, developing technologies “suitable for deep space exploration on future missions,” and “investigating the physical characteristics of the lunar surface.”
NASA is contributing an optical camera to the mission, known as ShadowCam, which will be used specifically to take high-resolution images of the permanently shadowed regions of the poles, “that are thought to contain ice.”
