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

[Jordan Trewitt]

If we have our S band antennas pointed up there, shouldn't we be able to
see the braking maneuver with the Doppler shift? Assuming the moon (or
Earth) doesn't block the signals.
-Jordan
KF5COQ

On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 8:22 AM Nico Janssen <hamsat at xs4all.nl> wrote:

>
> 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
>
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