In spite of a short history of only 30 years in space development, Korea has achieved outstanding space development capabilities, and became the 11th member of the “Space Club” in 2013 by launching its own satellites with its own launch vehicle from a local space center. With the successful development and operation of more than 10 earth-orbiting satellites since 1999, Korea is now rapidly expanding its own aspirations to outer space exploration. Unlike earth-orbiting missions, planetary missions are more demanding of well-rounded technological capabilities, specifically trajectory design, analysis, and navigation. Because of the importance of relevant technologies, the Korean astronautical society devoted significant efforts to secure these basic technologies from the early 2000s. This paper revisits the numerous efforts conducted to date, specifically regarding flight dynamics and navigation technology, to prepare for future upcoming planetary missions in Korea. However, sustained efforts are still required to realize such challenging planetary missions, and efforts to date will significantly advance the relevant Korean technological capabilities.

To ensure the successful launch of the Korea pathfinder lunar orbiter (KPLO) mission, the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) is now performing extensive trajectory design and analysis studies. From the trajectory design perspective, it is crucial to prepare contingency trajectory options for the failure of the first lunar brake or the failure of the first lunar orbit insertion (LOI) maneuver. As part of the early phase trajectory design and analysis activities, the required time of flight (TOF) and associated delta-V magnitudes for each recovery maneuver (RM) to recover the KPLO mission trajectory are analyzed. There are two typical trajectory recovery options, direct recovery and low energy recovery. The current work is focused on the direct recovery option. Results indicate that a quicker execution of the first RM after the failure of the first LOI plays a significant role in saving the magnitudes of the RMs. Under the conditions of the extremely tight delta-V budget that is currently allocated for the KPLO mission, it is found that the recovery of the KPLO without altering the originally planned mission orbit (a 100 km circular orbit) cannot be achieved via direct recovery options. However, feasible recovery options are suggested within the boundaries of the currently planned delta-V budget. By changing the shape and orientation of the recovered final mission orbit, it is expected that the KPLO mission may partially pursue its scientific mission after successful recovery, though it will be limited.

The first Korea lunar orbiter, Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), has been in development since 2016. After launch, the KPLO will execute several maneuvers to enter into the lunar mission orbit, and will then perform lunar science missions for one year. Among these maneuvers, the lunar orbit insertion (LOI) is the most critical maneuver because the KPLO will experience an extreme velocity change in the presence of the Moon’s gravitational pull. However, the lunar orbiter may have a delayed LOI burn during operation due to hardware limitations and telemetry delays. This delayed burn could occur in different captured lunar orbits; in the worst case, the KPLO could fly away from the Moon. Therefore, in this study, the burn delay for the first LOI maneuver is analyzed to successfully enter the desired lunar orbit. Numerical simulations are performed to evaluate the difference between the desired and delayed lunar orbits due to a burn delay in the LOI maneuver. Based on this analysis, critical factors in the LOI maneuver, the periselene altitude and orbit period, are significantly changed and an additional delta-V in the second LOI maneuver is required as the delay burn interval increases to 10 min from the planned maneuver epoch.

In this study, the uncertainty requirements for orbit, attitude, and burn performance were estimated and analyzed for the execution of the 1st lunar orbit insertion (LOI) maneuver of the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO) mission. During the early design phase of the system, associate analysis is an essential design factor as the 1st LOI maneuver is the largest burn that utilizes the onboard propulsion system; the success of the lunar capture is directly affected by the performance achieved. For the analysis, the spacecraft is assumed to have already approached the periselene with a hyperbolic arrival trajectory around the moon. In addition, diverse arrival conditions and mission constraints were considered, such as varying periselene approach velocity, altitude, and orbital period of the capture orbit after execution of the 1st LOI maneuver. The current analysis assumed an impulsive LOI maneuver, and two-body equations of motion were adapted to simplify the problem for a preliminary analysis. Monte Carlo simulations were performed for the statistical analysis to analyze diverse uncertainties that might arise at the moment when the maneuver is executed. As a result, three major requirements were analyzed and estimated for the early design phase. First, the minimum requirements were estimated for the burn performance to be captured around the moon. Second, the requirements for orbit, attitude, and maneuver burn performances were simultaneously estimated and analyzed to maintain the 1st elliptical orbit achieved around the moon within the specified orbital period. Finally, the dispersion requirements on the B-plane aiming at target points to meet the target insertion goal were analyzed and can be utilized as reference target guidelines for a mid-course correction (MCC) maneuver during the transfer. More detailed system requirements for the KPLO mission, particularly for the spacecraft bus itself and for the flight dynamics subsystem at the ground control center, are expected to be prepared and established based on the current results, including a contingency trajectory design plan.

In this study, we present the results of orbit determination (OD) using satellite laser ranging (SLR) data for the Science and Technology Satellite (STSAT)-2C by a short-arc analysis. For SLR data processing, the NASA/GSFC GEODYN II software with one year (2013/04 – 2014/04) of normal point observations is used. As there is only an extremely small quantity of SLR observations of STSAT-2C and they are sparsely distribution, the selection of the arc length and the estimation intervals for the atmospheric drag coefficients and the empirical acceleration parameters was made on an arc-to-arc basis. For orbit quality assessment, the post-fit residuals of each short-arc and orbit overlaps of arcs are investigated. The OD results show that the weighted root mean square post-fit residuals of short-arcs are less than 1 cm, and the average 1-day orbit overlaps are superior to 50/600/900 m for the radial/cross-track/along-track components. These results demonstrate that OD for STSAT-2C was successfully achieved with cm-level range precision. However its orbit quality did not reach the same level due to the availability of few and sparse measurement conditions. From a mission analysis viewpoint, obtaining the results of OD for STSAT-2C is significant for generating enhanced orbit predictions for more frequent tracking.

The first Korean satellite laser ranging (SLR) system, Daedeok SLR station (DAEK station) was developed by Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) in 2012, whose main objectives are space geodesy researches. In consequence, Korea became the 25th country that operates SLR system supplementing the international laser tracking network. The DAEK station is designed to be capable of 2 kHz laser ranging with precision of a few mm both in daytime and nighttime observation of satellites with laser retro-reflector array (LRA) up to the altitude of 25,000 km. In this study, characteristics and specifications of DAEK station are investigated and its data quality is evaluated and compared with International Laser Ranging Service (ILRS) stations in terms of single-shot ranging precision. The analysis results demonstrated that the DAEK station shows good ranging performance to a few mm precision. Currently, the DAEK station is under normal operations at KASI headquarters, however, it will be moved to Sejong city in 2014 to function as a fundamental station for space geodesy researches in combination with other space geodesy systems (GNSS, VLBI, DORIS, etc.).