If all goes well next week, South Korea will join the small number of countries to have sent spacecraft to the Moon—and scientists around the world are looking forward to the results.
The Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter carries “a cadre of instruments that will yield important information about the Moon,” says Clive Neal, a lunar scientist at the University of Notre Dame who is not involved in the mission.
The KPLO payload breaking new ground in lunar observations is the Wide-Angle Polarimetric Camera , which will catch the polarization of sunlight reflected at various angles from lunar surface particles, revealing details about their size across nearly the entire Moon.
“We were surprised to learn that no previous mission has done lunar polarimetry from a lunar orbit,” says Chae Kyung Sim, a planetary scientist at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute and a member of Sungsoo Kim’s team. This means there have been limited polarimetric observations of the Moon’s near side from Earth and none whatsoever of the far side.
Other scientific payloads include a magnetometer to measure the still poorly understood magnetism in the lunar environment. There haven’t been missions studying the Moon’s magnetic field for more than 10 years. A gamma ray spectrometer will provide more information on the distribution of elements on the lunar surface. And two cameras that make up the Lunar Terrain Imager will capture stereoscopic images of lunar features and scout for landing sites for a future South Korean lander.
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