Mission Summary
Danuri was South Korea’s first mission to the Moon, a milestone that placed the country among the handful of nations operating a spacecraft in lunar orbit. Launched August 4, 2022, the orbiter, whose name joins the Korean words for Moon and enjoy, was built by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute to test technologies and survey the Moon from polar orbit.
Rather than fly straight to the Moon, Danuri took a long, fuel-saving ballistic path out toward the Sun and back, arriving in lunar orbit in December 2022 and settling into a roughly 100-kilometer polar orbit. It carried six instruments, including NASA’s ShadowCam, a hypersensitive camera designed to peer into the permanently shadowed craters near the poles in search of ice.
The mission was a close U.S.-Korean collaboration, with NASA providing communications and navigation support along with a team of scientists. From orbit, Danuri returned high-resolution imagery and ShadowCam views of the darkened polar regions, data that will help guide future landings, including those planned under Artemis.
Sources and notes can be found on the Sources page.
