This image is of a permanently shadowed region on the moon's south pole filmed by ShadowCam, the NASA-funded high-resolution camera installed on Korea's first lunar orbiter Danuri. (Korea Aerospace Research Institute)

By Xu Aiying

The NASA-funded high-resolution shadow camera ShadowCam installed on Korea's first lunar orbiter Danuri has filmed a permanently shadowed region at the sunless south pole of the moon. 

Korea Aerospace Research Institute on Jan. 12 said Arizona State University of the U.S., the developer of ShadowCam, released an image of the area on the device's official website (http://shadowcam.sese.asu.edu).

The image shows a zone inside the 20 km-wide Shackleton crater in the southern lunar hemisphere. 

NASA has used its robotic spacecraft Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to study the crater, a potential landing site for the space agency's planned Artemis mission to send astronauts to the moon. 

The university said the image shows the never-before-seen permanently shadowed region, including a detailed view of the path of a boulder 5 m in diameter that rolled down the steeply sloping crater wall. 

The ShadowCam mounted on Danuri is a high-tech camera jointly developed by NASA and the university to analyze if water exists in permanently shadowed regions inside craters at the lunar poles. Because it is 200 times more sensitive to light than the narrow angle camera on the LRO, which was launched in 2009, ShadowCam can film areas of the moon never photographed before.