In brief: South Korea's inaugural lunar expedition is still on rail to launch next summertime, the country'south Ministry building of Science and ICT has confirmed. The mission is scheduled for lift-off in August 2022 and will hitch a ride to space courtesy of SpaceX'south Falcon nine rocket. The probe will accept roughly three months to achieve its destination and position itself in orbit.

Stage one of the mission aims to put a probe into orbit effectually the Moon. It'll behave a scattering of useful instruments including ShadowCam, a NASA instrument that will map the permanently adumbral regions of the Moon to search for minerals that could exist harvested to support future missions. It was developed by researchers at Arizona State Academy and Malin Space Science Systems as the Us' contribution to South korea's mission.

(The ShadowCam instrument will acquire images of shadowed regions of the moon using a high-resolution camera, telescope, and highly sensitive sensors.)

As The Register highlights, the orbiter will as well exist rigged with equipment to conduct Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) tests. DTN is an arroyo to computer networking that seeks to address technical issues that may ascend when a network lacks continuous connectivity.

Nosotros'll eventually reach a point where network connectivity in space becomes a necessity, but existing World-based solutions probable won't be ideal because they were not designed with many minutes of latency in heed, like what would happen when an "access indicate" dips behind the Moon for a few hours. DTN could address this by modifying the networking stack.

South korea's probe is also expected to measure the Moon's magnetosphere.

Phase 2 will include an orbiter, a lander and a rover to get together even more information, and is expected to launch in 2025.