[amsat-bb] LongJiang 1 & 2 to be launched towards the Moon

[Nico Janssen]

All,

The two Chinese microsats LongJiang 1 & 2 are to be launched
towards the Moon from Xichang on 2018-05-20 around 21:00 UTC.
They carry radio amateur payloads with 2 m uplinks and 70 cm
downlinks. Amateurs will be able to receive telemetry downlinks
but will also be allowed to send telecommands for taking and
downlinking pictures. There are also plans to enable FreeDV digital
voice communications through these spacecraft.

The two LongJiang satellites are planned to perform formation
flying in a high elliptical orbit around the Moon (300 x 9000 km).
After launch it will take about 4 and a half days to reach the Moon.
This GMAT script should work well for the first days after launch:
https://hamsat1.home.xs4all.nl/LongJiang_NYC.script
The groundstation used in this script is a random location in New
York City. You can change this to your location by updating the
values under the GroundStation tab in GMAT.

73,
Nico PA0DLO