Port to deep space: China’s ‘hopeless’ satellites create first Earth-moon nav-com network
DRO-L, DRO-A and DRO-B finally form a communication and navigation system spanning from low Earth orbit to distant retrograde orbit
The constellation of three satellites operating in “cislunar” space forms a highly efficient communication and navigation network stretching from low Earth orbit to distant retrograde orbit (DRO), a region 310,000km to 450,000km (192,600-280,000 miles) from Earth, according to state broadcaster CCTV.
That area is often seen as a potential staging point for missions to the moon, Mars and beyond.
Among the mission’s technical firsts was a record-setting 1.17 million km space-to-space communication link between satellites, showing that a network could stay connected reliably across the vast distance between Earth and the moon, CCTV said on Tuesday.
“For the first time, we’ve showed that satellites can track each other instead of relying on ground stations,” said Wang Wenbin, a researcher at the Centre for Space Applications Engineering and Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the lead institute on the project.