A NASA spacecraft has taken photographs of an oddly shaped object passing the Moon.
Now that you’ve gotten over the hype of the total solar eclipse which took place yesterday (April 8), how about a sighting of an object which ‘zipped’ past the Moon?
NASA has revealed ‘several images’ were captured by its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) between March 5 and 6, 2024.
The LRO has been circling and studying the Moon for a whopping 15 years and the LRO operations team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland used its ‘narrow angle camera’ to capture images of a strange object which went whizzing past the Moon last month.
The images show a surfboard or frisbee-like shaped object flying past the surface of the Moon and it didn’t take long for people to flood to social media to weigh in on the sighting.
One X user said: “If NASA sighted a surfboard shaped object near the moon it can mean only one thing. That NASA has invested in MARVEL comics after the announcement of a Silver Surfer movie soon.”
Unfortunately for Marvel fans, that’s not quite what the sighting was about.
A NASA spacecraft took the photographs. (NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University)
NASA clarified the object is actually Korea Aerospace Research Institute’s Danuri lunar orbiter – the Republic of Korea’s first spacecraft at the Moon and has been in lunar orbit since December 2022.
The spacecraft travelled past NASA’s LRO in ‘nearly parallel orbit’ and three of LRO’s orbits ‘happened to be close enough to Danuri’s to grab snapshots’, NASA’s website explains.
However, it adds LRO’s operations team on the ground in Maryland showed ‘exquisite timing in pointing LROC [the type of camera] to the right place at the right time’ as the two spacecraft were travelling at ‘fast relative velocities’ of around ‘7,200 miles or 11,500 kilometers per hour’.
NASA adds: “Although LRO’s camera exposure time was very short, only 0.338 milliseconds, Danuri still appears smeared to 10 times its size in the opposite direction of travel because of the relative high travel velocities between the two spacecraft.
The ‘surfboard’ like object is Korea Aerospace Research Institute’s Danuri lunar orbiter. (NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University)
NASA adds the first image was ‘oriented’ to capture Danuri ‘from three miles, or five kilometers, above it’.
The third photograph was also ‘reorientated’ to catch a glimpse of the Korean spacecraft at five miles (eight kilometers) below and a duplicate of the image was ‘stretched’ and pixels containing the Danuri ‘unsmeared’ so it’s clearer to see the spacecraft.
NASA adds: “The image was rotated 90 degrees so the surface would look like something a person would see looking out the window.”