South Korea’s KSLV-2 Rocket Delivers Payloads To Orbit

June 23, 2022 by Chris Lott 5 Comments

South Korea’s domestically developed KSLV-2 “Nuri” rocket successfully placed six payloads into low Earth orbit Tuesday, after lifting off from from Naro Space Center at 4 PM KST. This follows an earlier attempt in October which failed to reach orbit after the booster’s third stage engine shutdown prematurely. The flight followed an initial trajectory over the East China Sea, after which the upper stage steered out towards the Philippine Sea, finally placing the payload in the desired orbital inclination of 98 degrees. This less-than-ideal path wasted energy, but ensured that the first and second stages fell into the ocean and not onto people. Success was confirmed shortly after launch as the vehicle passed over South Korea’s King Sejong Station in Antarctica.

The payload on this test flight was primarily a mass simulator of 1.3 metric tons, but a small Performance Verification Satellite (PVSAT) was included, for a grand total of 1.5 metric tons. The PVSAT itself monitors vehicle performance, but also serves as a carrier for four CubeSats. These were developed by engineering teams at various local universities and will be deployed in the coming days.

If you’re inclined to track these, the launch has been given COSPAR ID 2022-065 and the first three objects (third stage, dummy mass, and PVSAT) have been assigned the NORAD catalog numbers 52894, 52895, and 52896. It’s too early to tell which is which at this point, but as more data about their respective orbits are collected, it should be possible to tell them apart. The next four catalog numbers, 52897 – 52900, have been reserved for the CubeSats once they are released.

With this launch, South Korea has become the 10th nation to put a payload into space using its own domestic technology, and the 7th to loft a payload of more than one ton to orbit — joining the ranks of the United States, Russia, Japan, China, France, and India.

Continue reading “South Korea’s KSLV-2 Rocket Delivers Payloads To Orbit” →

Illuminating Origami Is Just Around The Corner

January 12, 2022 by Michael Shaub 13 Comments

Pop-up greeting cards are about to get a whole lot more interesting. Researchers at Seoul National University in Korea have created glowing 3D objects with a series of prototypes that fold thin QLED (Quantum Dot LED) sheets like origami. They used a CO₂ laser to etch “fold lines” in the QLED so the sheets could be formed into 3D shapes. The bends are actually rounded, but at 5μm they appear to be sharp corners and the panels continue to illuminate across the fold lines for at least 500 folds. Some glow in solid colors, while others use smaller addressable areas to create animated matrix displays of patterns and letterforms. See the short video after the break, read the Physics World article or to see all the prototypes and dig into details of the full research paper in Nature (freed from the paywall by SharedIt).

Folded QLED Panels – forming a pyramid and a cube

Folded QLED Panels – various patterns and the 3D forms they fold into

We’re not sure how soon this technique can be duplicated in our home labs, but we can’t wait to fold up our own 3D lights and matrices. Until then, check out some glowing origami you can make right now from [Charlyn Gonda] at Remoticon 2020 and earlier that year and this amazing origami lamp.

Continue reading “Illuminating Origami Is Just Around The Corner” →

Seoul Introduces Self-Driving Taxis

December 26, 2021 by Chris Lott 15 Comments

Last year the Seoul city government passed an ordinance enabling the commercial operation of autonomous passenger-carrying vehicles. A six square kilometer region in the Seoul neighborhood of Sangam, near the 2002 World Cup Stadium, was designated as a pilot program test bed. This area encompasses 24 streets totaling 31.3 km. Two companies were selected, and the pilot program launched a few weeks ago. Currently there are three vehicles and passengers can ride for free during this introductory phase. Three more taxis and a bus will be added within this year, with plans for 50 in this region by 2026. For the time being, these cars require a standby driver who takes control in an emergency and in school zones. Check out the short news report (in English) below the break.

There was a smaller autonomous driving test program in the city of Sejong which we wrote about back in January, and [Alfred Jones] gave a keynote presentation at the 2020 Hackaday Remoticon on the challenges of designing self-driving vehicles if you want to learn more on this topic.

Continue reading “Seoul Introduces Self-Driving Taxis” →

South Korean KSLV-2 Nuri Rocket Almost Orbits

November 8, 2021 by Chris Lott 4 Comments

There was a bit of excitement recently at the Naro Space Center on Outer Naro Island, just off the southern coast of the Korea Peninsula. The domestically developed South Korean Nuri rocket departed on its inaugural flight from launch pad LB-2 at 5pm in the afternoon on Thursday, 21 Oct. The previous launch in the KSLV-2 program from this facility was in 2018, when a single-stage Test Launch Vehicle was successfully flown and proved out the basic vehicle and its KRE-075 engines.

This final version of the three-stage Nuri rocket, formally known as Korean Space Launch Vehicle-II (KSLV-2), is 47.2 m long and 3.5 m in diameter. The first stage is powered by a cluster of four KRE-075 sea-level engines having 3 MN of thrust. The second stage is a single KRE-075 vacuum engine with 788 kN thrust, and the final stage is a KRE-007 vacuum engine with 69 kN thrust (all these engines are fueled by Jet-A / LOX). In this maiden flight, the first two stages performed as expected, but something went wrong when the third stage shut off prematurely and failed to gain enough velocity to put the 1400 kg dummy satellite into orbit.

A committee formed to investigate the flight failure convened this week, and issued a statement after a preliminary review of the collected telemetry data. So far, all indications point to a drop in oxidizer tank pressure in the third stage. This could be the result of a leak in the tank itself or the associated plumbing. They will also investigate whether a sensor or other failure in the tank pressurization control system could be at fault. A second launch is currently scheduled for May of next year. Check out [Scott Manley]’s video below the break, where he discusses the launch itself and some history of South Korea’s space program.

Continue reading “South Korean KSLV-2 Nuri Rocket Almost Orbits” →

1700 Regulatory Approvals Revoked In South Korea

June 19, 2021 by Chris Lott 40 Comments

For the first time since its inception, the Korea Communications Commission this week revoked the regulatory approvals of 1,696 telecommunications devices from 378 companies, both foreign and domestic. Those companies must recall unsold inventory from the shelves, and prove conformity of existing products already sold. In addition, the companies may not submit new applications for these items for one year. It’s not clear what would happen to already-sold equipment if the manufacturer is unable to prove conformity as requested — perhaps a recall? Caught up in this are CCTV products, networking equipment, Bluetooth speakers, and drones from companies like Huawei, DJI, and even Samsung.

The heart of the issue are what’s known as Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRAs) between countries to officially recognize of each other’s certification testing laboratories (or Conformity Assessment Bodies, CAB, in the lingo of the industry). Currently ten countries (USA, Canada, Mexico, UK, Israel, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, and Australia), the 27 member states of the EU, Taiwan and Hong Kong all have MRAs with each other. Based on these MRAs, a Korean manufacturer could have a product tested by a laboratory in Israel, for example, and all would be kosher with the KCC.

At the center of attention is the Bay Area Compliance Laboratories (BACL), established in 1996 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. BACL has laboratories all over the world (USA, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and mainland China). Except for those in mainland China, all BACL laboratories are acceptable per the MRAs. The KCC received a tip last year that some compliance test reports for some products might be defective.

A six-month investigation in cooperation with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) resulted in the announcement this week. Korean companies, 378 of them to be exact, had submitted test reports from BACL Sunnyvale which appeared to be appropriate. But on further investigation, it was learned that the actual testing was done by BACL laboratories in mainland China and only the reports were prepared in Sunnyvale.

It’s not clear whether these companies were knowingly playing fast and loose with the rules, whether BACL was complicit, if it was just a misunderstanding of the intricacies of the regulations and MRAs, or a combination of all three. Regardless, the KCC said that intent doesn’t matter according the their rules. It also has not been suggested that the products themselves are problematic, nor has anyone suggested that BACL’s Chinese laboratories performed slipshod work — rather, the KCC says it has no choice but to proceed with the revocation based on the applicable laws.

Forgotten Tech — Self Driving Cars

April 6, 2021 by Chris Lott 29 Comments

The notion of self driving cars isn’t new. You might be surprised at the number of such projects dating back to the 1920s. Many of these systems relied on external aids built into the roadways. It’s only recently that self driving cars on existing roadways are becoming closer to reality than fiction — increased computer processing power, smaller and power-efficient computers, compact Lidar and millimeter-wave Radar sensors are but a few enabling technologies. In South Korea, [Prof Min-hong Han] and his team of students took advantage of these technological advances and built an autonomous car which successfully navigated the streets of Seoul in several field trials. A second version subsequently drove itself along the 300 km journey from Seoul to the southern port city Busan. You might think this is boring news, until you realize this was accomplished back in the early 1990s using an Intel 386-powered desktop computer.

The project created a lot of buzz at the time, and was shown at the Daejeon Expo ’93 international exposition. Alas, the government eventually decided to cancel the research program, as it didn’t fit into their focus on heavy industries like ship building and steel production. Given the tremendous focus on self-driving and autonomous vehicles today, and with the benefit of hindsight, we wonder if that was the best choice. This isn’t the only decision from Seoul that seems questionable when viewed from the present — Samsung executives famously declined to buy Andy Rubin’s new operating system for digital cameras and handsets back in late 2004, and a few weeks later Android was purchased by Google.

You should check out [Prof Han]’s YouTube channel showing videos of the car’s camera while operating in various conditions and overlaid with the lane recognition markers and other information. I’ve driven the streets of Seoul, and that alone can be a frightening experience. But [Han] manages to stretch out in the back seat, so confident in his system that he doesn’t even wear a seatbelt.

Continue reading “Forgotten Tech — Self Driving Cars” →

South Korean Mapping Satellite Reaches Orbit

March 24, 2021 by Chris Lott 4 Comments

South Korea’s space program achieved another milestone yesterday with the launch of the first Compact Advanced Satellite 500 (CAS500) in a planned series of five vehicles. A second-generation Russian Soyuz 2.1a lifted the Korean-made CAS500-1 from historic Baikonur Cosmodrome in southern Kazakhstan and successfully placed it into a 500 km sun-synchronous orbit, inclined by 97.7 degrees or 15 orbits/day. Living up to its reputation as a workhorse, the Soyuz then proceeded to deposit multiple other satellites into 600 km and 550 km orbits. The satellite is pretty substantial, being 2.9 m tall and 1.9 m diameter and topping the scales at 500 kg. (Don’t be confused, like we were, by this Wikipedia article that says it is a 1.3 kg CubeSat.)

South Korea already has over a dozen satellites in orbit, and the CAS500 adds a modular space platform to the mix. It was designed by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) to provide a core backbone which can be easily adapted to other missions, not unlike a car manufacturer that sells several different models all based on the same underlying chassis. Another down-to-earth goal of the CAS500 program was to foster the transfer of core technologies from state-owned KARI to private industry. We wonder how such figures are calculated, but reportedly 91.3% of CAS500-1 was made in Korea. Subsequent flights will further involve local services and industry.

The purpose of the first two satellites is to provide images to the private sector, for example, online mapping and navigation platforms. How popular this will be is yet to be determined — as one local newspaper notes, the 2 meter image resolution (50 cm in monochrome) pales in comparison to Google’s advertised 15 cm resolution. The next three satellites will focus on space science imagery.

The Soyuz launch is shown below, and this short video clip from KARI shows a nice animation of the satellite. Try not to cringe at the simulated whooshing sound as two satellites pass each other in the vacuum of space — turn down the volume if you need to.

Continue reading “South Korean Mapping Satellite Reaches Orbit” →