Before impacting the Moon, Longjiang-2 facilitated a ‘QSO’, or contact, between the HIT Amateur Radio Club amateur radio and Reinhard Kuehn, a first using an amateur transponder orbiting the Moon.

Longjiang-2 hints at what is now possible for relatively low-cost, small satellites in deep space, on the heels of the NASA MarCO probes which were part of the Mars InSight mission.

The satellite was also used to verify the ultra-long wave technology for astronomical observation and solar radiation research, and its success may lead to more ambitious missions in the future.

Professor Ping Jinsong of the National Astronomical Observatories of China told SpaceNews last year that future similar missions are being considered: “To fly a low-cost constellation in lunar space or at the Sun-Earth Lagrange 1 and 2 points area, with EMC quiet platform for each satellite unit, and with space Very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) working mode…should be a reasonable choice in the near future,” Ping said.

The Harbin team, which had already developed LilacSat-1 and LilacSat-2, are now working the Association of Sino-Russian Technical Universities (ASRTU) satellite.

The projected Longjiang-2 impact site was about 300 kilometers north of the crash site of NASA’s Lunar Orbiter 1. That 385.6 kg spacecraft, coincidentally, took the first image of the Earth and the Moon on 23 August 1966.