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NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed a mysterious surfboard-shaped object orbiting the moon. This is the truth.
The close encounter was not a UFO or alien megastructure. Instead, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spotted South Korea’s lunar orbiter, Danuri, passing by as the two spacecraft circled the moon, NASA officials said in a statement.
Because the two spacecraft were “traveling in nearly parallel orbits,” the LRO operations team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland took the opportunity to photograph the event, which took place between March 5 and 6.
As reported by Livescience, the LRO camera has a very short exposure time, namely around 0.338 milliseconds, so this event is difficult to immortalize.
But it still managed to get photos of Danuri, the first Korean spacecraft to enter lunar orbit, which it achieved in December 2022.
However, due to the speed difference between the two spacecraft — approximately 7,200 mph (11,500 km/h) — the resulting image made Danuri appear “blown out to 10 times its size.”
This stretching effect causes it to resemble a flat surfboard.
Paul Byrne, a professor of planetary science at Washington University in St. Louis, shared some images on X (formerly Twitter).
“To be clear, the Danuri orbiter is not a very thin pixel – it is a fairly normal-looking orbiter,” Byrne wrote.
“But the incredible speeds involved meant that it smeared on the LRO camera detectors.”
It didn’t take long for people to comment on how the orbiter looked familiar to the Silver Surfer, a fictional humanoid alien in the Marvel Universe, according to NDTV, an India-based news outlet.
