Skepticism rising on NK satellite

North Korea’s Unha-3 rocket launched last week is seen in its preparatory stages in this screen capture from a documentary aired Thursday on the North’s Korean Central Television. / Yonhap

Further skepticism circulated Friday over North Korea’s “working satellite,” sent into orbit last week, after a scientist here said it does not appear to be working properly, the latest in a series of such assessments.

Washington and Seoul have acknowledged that the Kim Jong-un regime put an object in orbit. But experts have raised skepticism over Pyongyang’s claim that that the Kwangmyongsong-3 satellite is communicating with a control center and airing patriotic songs.

“It appears that there still is no contact between the satellite and the (control center),” Korea Aerospace Research Institute researcher Cho Gwang-rae said, adding that the disconnect made it unlikely that it is working properly.

Seen from the perspective of Seoul and many other countries, the success of the satellite is secondary to it being put into orbit by a multistage rocket, which demonstrated Pyongyang’s progress toward long-range missile capabilities.

Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics was quoted as saying earlier this week that the satellite was not angled toward the earth properly and that no sounds could be heard emanating from it.

Other scientists raised the possibility that it could have been damaged during the launch or separation or that it was a dummy.

The North had said the satellite was a copy of one shown to foreign media ahead of its failed launch in April. Weighing around 100 kilograms, the regime said it was equipped for observation and transmission of scientific data and to transmit songs praising the regime. Observation capabilities include those for monitoring forest resources and natural disasters and weather forecasting, it said.

Though the North says the launch was for science and tied its success to a drive to boost the state in related fields, it has been widely condemned, including by the U.N. Security Council, which said it violated resolutions. Seoul and Washington are pushing for further censure at the council and may mobilize other multilateral efforts targeting Pyongyang’s assets abroad as punishment.

North Korea is banned from conducting missile and nuclear tests, under U.N. sanctions imposed after a series of nuclear and missile tests in 2006 and 2009. <The Korea Times/Kim Young-jin>