2024-04-16 07:04:55
This object is not a UFO or alien megastructure. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured South Korea‘s Danuri lunar orbiter as both spacecraft orbited the moon, NASA officials said in a statement.
Because the two spacecraft were “travelling in nearly parallel orbits,” the LRO Operations Team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, USA, took the opportunity to take the photo on March 5-6. the event that occurred.
LRO’s camera has a very short exposure time of about 0.338 milliseconds, so it was difficult to capture the event. However, it still managed to photograph Danuri, the first Korean spacecraft to enter lunar orbit in 2022. December.
However, due to the difference in the speeds of the two spacecraft – approximately 11,500 km/h. – in the resulting photo, the Danuri appears “stretched to 10 times its size”. This stretching effect makes it resemble a flat surfboard.
The Danuri doesn’t actually look like a surfboard at all, it’s a box-shaped spacecraft with two solar panels attached to each side. Paul Byrne, associate professor of planetary science at the University of Washington, shared the images on the social network X.
“To be clear, the Danuri orbiter is not a weirdly thin pile of pixels – it’s a pretty normal-looking orbiter,” Byrne wrote. “But it’s been stretched by the LRO camera because of its terrific speed.”
People soon began commenting that the orbiter looked eerily similar to the Silver Surfer, a fictional alien from the Marvel universe, according to Live Science.
2024-04-16 07:04:55