Daniel Estévez

As a part of China’s Chang’e-4 lunar far side mission, two lunar microsatellites for low frequency radio astronomy, amateur radio and education, Longjiang-1 and Longjiang-2, were launched as secondary payloads on 20 May 2018 together with the Queqiao L2 relay satellite. On 25 May 2018, Longjiang-2 successfully inserted itself into a lunar elliptical orbit of 357 km × 13,704 km, and became the smallest spacecraft which entered lunar orbit with its own propulsion system. The satellite carried the first amateur radio communication system operating in lunar orbit, which is a VHF/UHF software defined radio (SDR) designed for operation with small ground stations. This article describes and evaluates the design of the VHF/UHF radio and the waveforms used. Flight results of the VHF/UHF radio are also presented, including operation of the radio, performance analysis of downlink signals and the first lunar orbit UHF very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) experiment.

We give some new criteria for a Hilbert space operator with spectrum on a smooth curve to be similar to a normal operator, in terms of pointwise and integral estimates of the resolvent. These results generalize criteria of Stampfli, Van Casteren and Naboko, and answer several questions posed by Stampfli. The main tools are from our recent results on dilation to the boundary of the spectrum, along with the Dynkin functional calculus for smooth functions, which is based on pseudoanalytic continuation.