[amsat-bb] LongJiang 1 & 2 arrive at the Moon

[Nico Janssen]

The Chinese microsats LongJiang 1 & 2 have arrived at the Moon.
On 2018-05-25 between 14:00 and 15:00 UTC they are expected to pass
the Moon at a distance of about 300 km. At that time they should
perform a braking maneuver so that they can enter a high elliptical
300 x 9000 km orbit around the Moon. The planned orbit inclination
is unknown.

Unfortunately there is virtually no information on these satellites
coming from China. It is not clear if LJ 1 is recovered. Telemetry is
being received from the S band downlink of LJ 2 at 2275.22 MHz.
All other information, including recent orbital data, is missing.

Note that the usual satellite tracking programs and regular TLE
data can not be used for tracking satellites near the Moon. You
really need specific deep space tracking software and orbital
elements. TLE sets for the LongJiangs that were published earlier
have no value at all now that these satellites are in the vicinity of
the Moon. Again I would like to refer to my web page on this
subject:
https://hamsat1.home.xs4all.nl/index.html

73,
Nico PA0DLO