{"id":449057,"date":"2026-05-28T07:09:07","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T07:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/449057\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T07:09:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T07:09:07","slug":"decoding-the-tianwen-2-sample-return-missions-telemetry-signal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/449057\/","title":{"rendered":"Decoding The Tianwen-2 Sample Return Mission\u2019s Telemetry Signal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>China\u2019s\u00a0Tianwen-2 asteroid sample return mission launched on 28 May of 2025 and is scheduled to arrive at its target \u2013 near-Earth asteroid 469219 Kamo\u2019oalewa \u2013 in June 2026. This gives folk back on Earth plenty of time to listen in on the probe\u2019s communication with its home base, such as [Daniel Est\u00e9vez] who <a href=\"https:\/\/destevez.net\/2026\/05\/decoding-tianwen-2\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">recently had a poke at this telemetry<\/a> as captured by the Dwingeloo radio telescope in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n<p>With not a lot of public information on its trajectory it\u2019s a hard probe to track, but now that it\u2019s nearing its destination there\u2019s an obvious part of the sky to aim for. This is X-band telemetry, broadcast at 8428.19 MHz, with the same basic modulation as its predecessor\u00a0Tianwen-1.<\/p>\n<p>Where it differs is in the coding, with\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Tianwen-2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Tianwen-2<\/a> also using concatenated coding, but having a frame length that\u2019s better suited to submitting full Reed-Solomon codewords and does not require omitting bytes to make things awkwardly fit.<\/p>\n<p>After analyzing the telemetry data itself, there doesn\u2019t seem to be anything exciting contained within this capture. This does seem to be as expected considering that the probe is still in its coast phase where it doesn\u2019t have to do much and likely is in a low-power state most of the time. Once its orbital insertion burn begins is when this knowledge can likely be used to track the mission in fine-grained detail, which is an event that we\u2019re definitely looking forward to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"China\u2019s\u00a0Tianwen-2 asteroid sample return mission launched on 28 May of 2025 and is scheduled to arrive at its&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":449058,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-449057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/449058"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}