We think a Tianwen-2 manoever happened on 7 June, as expected. With the Bochum telescope (@amsatdl) and the Dwingeloo telescope, we observe that a) Tianwen-2 is close to the asteroid on the sky and b) the line-of-sight velocity change (Doppler) now almost matches the asteroid's.
ALT Sky plot showing the location where the Dwingeloo telescope measured the Tianwen-2 spacecraft, with a 0.1 degree field of view. On 7 June, the spacecraft is apparently within 0.1 degree of the asteroid.
ALT Frequency residual w.r.t. Kamo'oalewa, with an estimated base freq of 8428.201 MHz. On 4-6 June the residual is between 13800 and 14300 Hz, increasing. From 7 June, the line is almost flat, changing only a few Hz in hours. This shows the change in line-of-sight velocity is now close to that of Kamo'oalewa.
Tracking #tianwen2 for a few days, we see that the Chinese spacecraft is clearly getting closer to the asteroid Kamo'oalewa. According to online rumours (see x.com/AJ_FI/status/191065037… from @AJ_FI), it would arrive 7 June 2026. That's consistent with our observations so far.
ALT Dwingeloo observations of Tianwen-2. A star plot (DSS background) with a blue line showing the coordinates of Kamo'oalewa over time and red dots showing the Dwingeloo radio telescope localizations of the spacecraft. A fit through the localizations shows that the spacecraft is getting closer to the asteroid.
New blog post: Decoding Tianwen-2. I analyze the telemetry decoded from recent @PI9CAM recordings of Tianwen-2. Compared to Tianwen-1, there is not much in the telemetry. There are not that many fields and most are mainly static.
ALT A post of a GNU Radio flowgraph GUI demodulating the signal from Tianwen-2, which has rather high SNR.
ALT A raster map of one of the decoded Space Packet APIDs. We can see a few fields changing values, but most of the contents are fairly static.