07 February 2021
The Chang'e 4 lunar lander and rover have resumed operations for the 27th lunar day on the far side of the Moon. The lander woke up on 6 February at 16:48 BJT, and the rover Yutu 2 entered operational mode earlier the same day at 4:26 BJT. So far, Yutu 2 has traveled about 628.5 m. It is currently located about 430 m northwest of the landing site. During the 27th lunar day, the panorama camera on the rover will take colored pictures of Moon rocks and impact craters. The rover will move southwest towards a rock with a diameter of about 18 cm in about 17.8 m distance. The infrared imaging spectrometer will be used to detect the rock and surrounding lunar soil. The neutral atom detector and lunar radar will continue to carry out scientific investigations.
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03 February 2021
Asia’s largest single-aperture fully steerable antenna is ready to go into service to communicate with the Tianwen 1 Mars mission deployed by China. The antenna in Tianjin city in northern China has a diameter of 70 m. It covers some 4,560 m2, an area about the size of 10 basketball courts. Chinese officials said on 3 February 2021, that the dish will help collect data from the Tianwen 1 Mars probe when it enters orbit around the red planet on 10 February.
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05 February 2021
OneSpace Technology Group Co. launched its "Chongqing Liangjiang Star" OS-X6B on 5 February at 17:05 BJT. The new smart suborbital rocket flew for about 580 seconds, reaching a maximum altitude of about 300 km. The launch served the verification of a number of key technologies and obtained a large amount of real flight environment data. The launch marks the first time that a private Chinese rocket company has realized controlled re-entry flight, human-in-the-loop space flight control, and (upper stage) redundant fault-tolerant control, according to OneSpace.
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04 February 2021
Landspace has completed the final assembly of the methalox TQ-12 engine, the new liquid-propellant rocket's first-stage engine for its ZQ-2 rocket. The engine has entered reliability tests and mass production, with its key technologies having achieved breakthroughs. Landspace's ZQ-2 rocket will be equipped with 4 TQ-12 engines in the 1st stage. ZQ-2 is a liquid oxygen-methane carrier rocket with the largest capacity under research in China.
On 30 January 2021, the TQ-12 methane engine underwent an 400 s test run, accumulating 2,000 s of testing from 5 consecutive long-duration tests.
On 29 January, Landspace reported that the payload fairing separation test of the Zhuque-2 launch vehicle was completed successfully.
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Methane engines to lift private rocket into orbit
05 February 2021
Tianwen 1 conducted its 4th orbital correction on 5 February at 20:00 BJT, CNSA reported. The correction ensured that the probe achieved a sound planned rendezvous with Mars. CNSA also published the first image of Mars, taken from a distance of 2.2 million km. The probe has traveled about 197 days in orbit, flying about 465 million km. It is currently 184 million km from Earth and 1.1 million km from Mars. All probe systems are in good working condition, CNSA said.
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04 February 2021
A new communication technology experiment satellite was launched on 4 February at 23:36 BJT by a Long March-3B carrier rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in Xichang, southwest China’s Sichuan Province. The satellite will be used in communication, radio, television and data transmission, as well as technology tests. This launch marked the 360th mission for the Long March series carrier rockets.
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