China · CNSAfirstrobotic
October 24, 2007
Chang'e 1 — China's first lunar orbiter
At dusk on 24 October 2007, a Long March 3A rose out of the hills of Xichang in Sichuan province, and for the first time a Chinese spacecraft left Earth's neighbourhood entirely. Chang'e 1 was named for the goddess who, in legend, drank an elixir of immortality and floated to the Moon. Now the myth had a modern echo: a national lunar exploration program announced barely four years earlier, taking its first step in front of a country that had never sent anything beyond Earth orbit.
The spacecraft itself was a clever economy: a 2,350-kilogram lunar explorer built on the DFH-3 communications-satellite bus, adapted for deep space and tracked by a ground network China had largely built for the occasion. After a patient series of phasing orbits, it braked into lunar orbit on 5 November 2007 and settled into a 200-kilometre circular polar orbit, passing over every part of the Moon once each 127 minutes. Its instruments included a microwave radiometer that performed the first passive, multi-channel microwave survey of the Moon, sensing metres down into the regolith.
China unveiled the mission's first lunar image on 26 November 2007 with national ceremony, and the orbiter went on to assemble a complete, high-resolution map of the lunar surface alongside surveys of its composition and environment. There was a touch of theatre, too: the spacecraft carried around 30 Chinese songs chosen by public vote, beamed home from lunar orbit. By the end of its extended mission it had returned 1,400 gigabits of data and outlived its one-year design life by about four months.
On 1 March 2009, controllers steered Chang'e 1 into a deliberate impact on the lunar surface, a controlled ending that doubled as practice for the precise manoeuvring a future landing would demand. The rehearsal mattered. Chang'e 2 followed in 2010, Chang'e 3 landed in 2013, and the line that began at Xichang ran straight to the far side of the Moon and to lunar samples returned to Earth. A nation's deep-space program began here.
Mission Data
Launch
24 Oct 2007, Xichang Satellite Launch Centre
Launch vehicle
Long March 3A
Launch mass
2,350 kg
Lunar orbit insertion
5 Nov 2007
Mapping orbit
200 km circular polar, 127 min period
Mission end
1 Mar 2009, controlled lunar impact
Key Facts
Chinese officials likened the mission's budget, roughly 1.4 billion yuan, to the cost of building about two kilometres of city subway.
It carried around 30 Chinese songs selected in a nationwide public vote and broadcast them back from lunar orbit.
The spacecraft was a converted communications satellite: the DFH-3 comsat bus re-engineered into China's first deep-space explorer.
Its microwave radiometer performed the world's first passive, multi-channel microwave remote sensing of the Moon, probing temperatures and regolith depth metres below the surface.
It returned 1,400 gigabits (about 175 GB) of data and exceeded its one-year design life by roughly four months before its planned impact.
Why It Mattered
Chang'e 1 was China's first step beyond Earth orbit, and it carried an entire infrastructure with it: deep-space tracking, lunar navigation, and the operational experience of flying 400,000 kilometres from home. Its complete lunar map and pioneering microwave survey delivered real science, but the mission's larger achievement was institutional, proving the Chang'e program's step-by-step method. The lineage it opened, orbit, then land, then return samples, proceeded almost exactly on schedule, making China a first-rank lunar power and reshaping the second Moon race of the 2020s.
NASA / Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (public domain)
Official source
