Is it a bird, is it a plane, is it Superman?
NASA photographed a sliver of a mysterious, almost bullet-shaped object near the surface of the moon last month, images released by the space administration on Friday show.
The pics, taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), depict a thin horizontal line of an object resembling the board of the Marvel’s Silver Surfer character.
But the curious subject is not something from the comic book world or superhero movies or even a UFO. It belongs to South Korea.
LRO captured several images of its Korean counterpart, Korea Aerospace Research Institute’s Danuri lunar orbiter, as the two zipped past each other in parallel, but opposite directions between March 5 and 6, NASA said.
The image of Danuri, which has been orbiting the moon since December 2022, is distorted because of the extremely fast relative velocities between it and the LRO — about 7,200 miles per hour.
The result is a photo that smears the Korean spacecraft to 10 times its size in the opposite direction of travel — with the LRO’s camera’s short exposure time.
The Danuri is South Korea’s first spacecraft at the moon, while the LRO has been circling the Earth’s natural satellite for 15 years.
The LRO operations team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland pinpointed its camera at the right time and place to catch a glimpse of Danuri — a feat that required “exquisite timing,” according to the space agency.
In a role reversal last spring, Danuri photographed the LRO as it passed about 11 miles above the US spacecraft on April 7.
