NASA’s lunar orbiter was investigating the moon when it captured a surfboard-shaped UFO near the surface.
Photographs taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) showed a long, narrow and apparently flat object in just a few shots.
While some had speculated that the sighting was nothing more than a digital artifact, others were certain that NASA had captured aliens visiting near our world.
But the US space agency later revealed that the LRO captured Korea’s lunar orbiter, Danuri, as it rose just a few miles away.
This image shows Danuri in the white box. The large bowl-shaped crater visible in the upper left is 12 kilometers wide.
Danuri flew past the LRO, about 3 miles closer to the moon than the NASA spacecraft. Its appearance is due to its speed.
The LRO has been orbiting Earth’s moon and taking photographs since 2009, when it was NASA’s first lunar mission in a decade.
And it turns out that the spacecraft is in an orbit almost parallel to Danuri, which was launched in 2022 by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI).
The two objects’ relative speed to each other is a whopping 7,200 miles per hour, so the LRO operations team had to have incredibly fast timing to capture it on camera.
In the end, Danuri looked 10 times longer than it actually is, hence its surfboard appearance.
Although the LRO’s camera exposure time was only 0.338 milliseconds, Danuri’s immense speed meant that it still only appeared as a blur, spread beyond recognition.
Paul Byrne, professor of planetary science at the University of Washington in St Louise, shared some of the LRO images on X.
“To be clear, the Danuri orbiter is not some weirdly thin payload of pixels; it’s a pretty normal-looking orbiter,” Byrne posted.
“But the tremendous speeds involved mean it gets smeared on the LRO’s camera detector.”
Danuri was traveling just five miles below LRO last week when the images were taken.
In three separate meetings, NASA staff took photographs of the object.each time giving up a surfboard.
Danuri actually has the typical shape of an uncrewed spacecraft: a box in the middle with two solar panels on each side.
Both Danuri and the LRO are designed to take photographs of the moon, capturing images of regions of the moon that are permanently in shadow.
Danuri took this image of the LRO in April 2023 as the Korean spacecraft passed 11 miles above the NASA spacecraft.
By its second encounter, the LRO was only about 2.5 miles above Danuri. However, once again, the photo he captured was elongated due to their relative speeds.
In the new series of photographs, Danuri is virtually unrecognizable.
Not only were both spaceships traveling at thousands of miles per hour, but they were going in opposite directions from each other, adding to the blurring effect.
And although the LRO is set to orbit the moon indefinitely, Danuri’s passes are intended to set the stage for an eventual landing mission on the moon’s surface.