Abstract A lander and a rover were placed on the Moon in China’s Chang’E-4 Lunar exploration mission, which is the first lander on the far side of the Moon. To provide communication and telemetry between the Earth and the lander, the CE-4 relay satellite (Queqiao) was launched firstly to the Earth-Moon L2 region in May 2018. The orbit precision of the Chang’E-4 relay satellite is evaluated in this paper. The ground tracking data including Ranging, Doppler, VLBI delay and rate are processed using a batch least squares method. The results show that the residual RMS of ranging, Doppler, VLBI delay and VLBI delay rate based on S-band are about 0.53 m, 0.37 mm/s, 1.16 ns and 0.67 ps/s, respectively. Compared with the previous missions (CE-1/CE-2/CE-5T1) using S-band tracking systems, the measurement precision of the CE-4 relay satellite is significantly improved. Furthermore, the analysis shows that VLBI data can improve the precision of orbit determination and prediction of the halo orbit around the Earth-Moon L2 point: the position precision is better than 100 m and the velocity precision is better than 2 mm/s. Since the CE-4 relay satellite is less than 300 km away from the lunar surface when it flies by the Moon, the lunar non-spherical gravitation has a significant influence on the orbit determination, and the lunar gravity field need to be considered when the Earth is chosen as the central body.


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    Title :

    Orbit and tracking data evaluation of Chang’E-4 relay satellite


    Contributors:
    Qin, Songhe (author) / Huang, Yong (author) / Li, Peijia (author) / Shan, Quan (author) / Fan, Min (author) / Hu, Xiaogong (author) / Wang, Guangli (author)

    Published in:

    Advances in Space Research ; 64 , 4 ; 836-846


    Publication date :

    2019-05-16


    Size :

    11 pages




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English