South Korea’s military said on Wednesday that it had retrieved the wreckage of a North Korean spy satellite which fell into the sea in May after a failed launch. According to a Reuters report, they said that they found no meaningful military use as a reconnaissance satellite. Last month, the South Korean military had also recovered parts of a rocket from a botched launch, the booster and payload crashed into the sea soon after takeoff. It is the first time South Korea has secured a satellite launched by the North, South Korean military experts said.
The military said in a statement, that after a detailed analysis on the salvage parts of North Korea’s space launch vehicle and satellite, experts from South Korea and US found that those had no military utility as an observation satellite.
On Wednesday, the South’s military said it had ended the salvage operations which began soon after the debris plunged into the country’s west coast on May 31.This involved aircraft, the navy and deep-sea divers.
South Korea’s military tracked the launch of the space vehicle and identified a large, cylindrical piece of debris in the water just hours after the launch, but the object sank to the seabed. It was recovered two weeks later.
Lee Choon-geun, an expert at South Korea’s Science and Technology Policy Institute said that the preliminary assessment showed the reconnaissance capability of the equipment was poor in terms of resolution and tracing targets.
Yang Uk, a fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul, also said “the resolution of the optical device loaded on the satellite was not suitable for military use”.
Meanwhile, North Korea in a rare public admission said that the launch was a grave failure but it vowed to succeed. The country has pursued a satellite launch programme since the 1990s and has said it would launch its first reconnaissance satellite to boost monitoring of US military activities. In 2012 and 2016, North Korea launched objects that still remain in orbit. Pyongyang said they are observation satellites, but there has been no confirmation they were functioning or transmitting signals.
The May 31 launch was widely condemned by South Korea, Japan, and the West as a violation of international law and UN Security Council resolutions that ban the use of ballistic missile technology by the North.
Pyongyang rejects such criticism as an infringement of its sovereign right to self-defence and space exploration.