NEW DELHI, India — China is preparing to put a brand new communications satellite in lunar orbit to facilitate ambitious upcoming moon landing missions.
Queqiao-2 is ready to launch on a Long March 8 rocket from the coastal Wenchang spaceport in early 2024, in accordance with Zhang Lihua of DFH Satellite under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC), the satellite’s developer.
The 1,200-kilogram satellite will feature a 4.2-meter-diameter parabolic antenna and a mission lifetime of greater than eight years, Zhang said during a presentation on the 74th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Baku, Oct. 3.
Li Guoping of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) presented a slide detailing China’s exploration timeline earlier at IAC indicating Queqiao-2 is ready to launch in March.
Its initial task will likely be communications support for Chang’e-6; a first-ever attempt at collecting samples from the far side of the moon. That mission is scheduled to launch in Q2 2024 and can goal the mid-latitude Apollo crater inside the South Pole-Aitken basin.
The moon is tidally locked to the Earth, meaning that one hemisphere of the planetary body all the time faces our planet. Queqiao-2’s 24-hour-period, elliptical frozen orbit will take it out beyond the moon, from which it’s going to have line of sight with each ground stations on Earth and Chang’e-6 in Apollo crater. Chang’e-6 lunar surface operations will likely be wrapped up in around 48 hours.
Queqiao-2 will then support the 2026 Chang’e-7 and 2028 Chang’e-8 missions to the lunar south pole. The lunar satellite will switch to a 12-hour period orbit for these missions. It’ll meanwhile assist the continuing Chang’e-4 lunar far side lander and rover after the short-term Chang’e-6 mission. The elliptical frozen orbit could be very stable, in accordance with Zhang, requiring little fuel for maintenaince.
Queqiao-2, or “Magpie Bridge-2”, is a more capable follow-up to Queqiao, launched in 2018 to facilitate the Chang’e-4 mission. That first relay satellite stays operational in a halo orbit across the Earth-moon Lagrange point L2 roughly 70,000 kilometers beyond the moon.
It’ll use X and UHF bands to speak with spacecraft, and S and Ka-bands for communications with Earth. It features multiple data rates and reconfigurable software.
The brand new satellite will launch with a pair of experimental CubeSats, named Tiandu-1 and Tiandu-2, to check lunar communications and navigation payloads.
The CubeSats are being developed by China’s recent Deep Space Exploration Laboratory (DSEL) under CNSA, which is playing a growing role within the country’s lunar exploration and related diplomatic efforts.
Queqiao-2 also carries science payloads. These are an extreme ultraviolet camera, an array neutral atom imager and an Earth-moon length baseline very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) experiment.
The spacecraft could also aid other countries’ lunar efforts. “Aside from providing relay support for future Chinese lunar missions, it is feasible to offer relay communication services for other lunar landing exploration missions on the lunar south pole or lunar far side in the longer term,” Zhang said.The Queqiao-2 satellite can be potentially the subsequent step in a constellation of the identical name.
The broader Queqiao constellation would offer communications, navigation and distant sensing support for China’s International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) project. Notably, an expanded future version of the network would come with relay satellites at Venus and Mars to help deep space exploration.