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
participants (12)
-
charlie＠sucklingfamily.free-online.co.uk -
Dimitry Borzenko -
Jean Marc Momple -
Joe -
Jordan Trewitt -
Mike Rupprecht -
Mvivona -
Nico Janssen -
Ray Hoad -
Scott -
Stefan Wagener -
Zach Metzinger