China’s DRO-A,B Satellite Launch ‘Not Successful’- State Media
The Chinese state media Xinhua on Thursday announced that the launch of DRO-A and B satellite on Wednesday was not successful. The Chinese spacecrafts apparently intended for lunar orbit, have potentially been lost following an issue with a Long March rocket’s upper stage.
Xinhua provided no details of the nature of the DRO-A and B satellites. However, it is thought that the pair were intended to enter a distant retrograde orbit (DRO) around the moon. If correct, this would have seen DRO-A and B target a high lunar orbit that moves in the opposite direction to the moon’s rotation around Earth.
DRO orbits are highly stable and could offer advantages for exploration, science, and infrastructure, such as acting as a waypoint, lunar observation and communications.
The DRO-A and B satellites are designed to communicate with another satellite, named DRO-L, in low Earth orbit (LEO), according to a paper published in the Journal of Deep Space Exploration in 2023. The paper discusses high-precision relative navigation technology for a pair of satellites operating in DRO. China launched the DRO-L satellite, developed by IAMCAS under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, into LEO on a Jielong-3 rocket in February.
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China had neither indicated plans for a lunar launch nor officially stated the purpose of the DRO-A/B satellites.
However, adding weight to the idea that the launch was targeting the moon is that U.S. Space Force’s space domain awareness group has not reported any new objects in LEO associated with Wednesday’s launch.
Launches beyond LEO often take longer to be catalogued. The pertinent airspace closure notices issued before launch also suggest a launch heading beyond LEO.
China tested out using a lunar distant retrograde orbit in 2022 with the service module from the successful Chang’e-5 moon sample return mission. This was part of the spacecraft’s extended mission. NASA’s Orion spacecraft for the Artemis 1 mission entered DRO in November 2022.
The DRO-A/B mission does not appear to be a major part of China’s lunar exploration program. It is rather a technology and orbit-testing mission that could play a role in its wider lunar ambitions to establish lunar navigation and communications infrastructure to support lunar exploration.
The DRO-A and B satellites will also be relatively small, with the Long March 2C capable of launching around 1,250 kilograms to geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO).
