2024-04-14 00:04:21
Published on: April 13, 2024 Last updated: April 13, 2024
published US Space Agency NASA has photographed a mysterious surfboard-shaped object orbiting the moon.
The images were taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and showed a long, flat object, sparking speculation among conspiracy theorists that it might be an unidentified flying object.
But NASA later clarified that the LRO spacecraft had already captured its South Korean counterpart, Danori, while flying just a few kilometers away.
According to the US space agency, LRO has been orbiting the moon and taking images since 2009, when it was NASA’s first lunar mission in a decade.
It turns out that the vehicle is in an orbit almost parallel to the “Danori” spacecraft launched by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) in 2022.
The relative velocity between the two objects (the speed of the moving object relative to the observer) is 7,200 mph (11,500 km), so the LRO operations team had to have very quick timing to capture the vehicle on camera.
In the end, Danori appeared ten times larger than she actually was, hence her appearance on the skateboard.
Although the camera’s LRO exposure time (the amount of light that can be projected onto a photographic medium) was just 0.338 milliseconds, Danori’s tremendous speed meant that it always appeared blurry and stretched – beyond recognition.
Paul Byrne, a professor of planetary science at Washington University in St. Louis, shared some LRO images on his account via the “X” platform.
Dhanuri was traveling just 8 kilometers down the LRO last week when the photos were taken.
In three separate encounters, NASA employees took photos of it, each time resulting in a surfboard-like structure.
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