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NASA's lunar orbit was investigating the moon when it captured a surf board-shaped UFO whizz by the surface.
Photos taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) showed a long, narrow, and apparently flat object in a few shots.
While some had speculated the sighting was nothing more than a digital artifact, others were sure NASA had captured aliens visiting close to our world.
But the American space agency later revealed LRO captured Korea's lunar orbiter, Danuri as it soared just a few miles away.
This image shows Danuri in the white box. The large bowl-shaped crater visible in the upper left is 7.5 miles wide.
Danuri streaked by the LRO, about 3 miles closer to the moon than the NASA spacecraft. Its appearance is due to its speed.
The Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter, nicknamed Danuri – meaning 'enjoy the moon' – was fired into space atop a Falcon 9 booster.
AdvertisementThe LRO has been orbiting Earth's moon and snapping photos since 2009, when it was NASA's first moon mission in a decade.
And it turns out the craft is on a nearly parallel orbit with Danuri, which was launched in 2022 by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI).
The relative speed of the two objects to one another is a whopping 7,200 miles per hour, so the LRO operations team had to have lightning quick timing to capture it on camera.
In the end, Danuri appeared 10 times longer than it really is, hence its surfboard appearance.
Even though the LRO's camera exposure time was only 0.338 milliseconds, Danuri's immense speed meant that it still only showed up as a blur, stretched beyond recognition.
Paul Byrne, a professor of planetary science at Washington University in St Louise, shared a few of LRO's images on X.
'To be clear, the Danuri orbiter is not a weirdly thin load of pixels—it's a fairly normal-looking orbiter,' Byrne posted.
'But the terrific speeds involved mean that it's smeared on the LRO's camera detector.'
Danuri was traveling just five miles below LRO last week when the images were taken.
Over three separate encounters, NASA staff snapped photos of the object, each time yielding a surfboard.
Danuri is actually a typical uncrewed spacecraft shape: a box in the middle with two solar panels on either side.
Both Danuri and the LRO are designed to take photos of the moon, capturing images of regions of the moon that are permanently shadowed.
Danuri snapped this image of the LRO in April 2023 as the Korean spacecraft passed 11 miles above the NASA one.
For their second encounter, the LRO was only about 2.5 miles above Danuri. Once again, though, the photo it captured was stretched out because of their relative speeds.
In the new set of photos, Danuri is all but unrecognizable.
Not only were both spacecrafts traveling at thousands of miles an hour, but they were going in opposite directions from each other - adding to the blur effect.
And while the LRO is set to orbit the moon indefinitely, Danuri's passes are meant to set the stage for an eventual landing mission on the moon's surface.
