The fairing was recovered near Suichuan, Jiangxi province, a city NE of the NOTAM prohibited zone.(source)
I have been looking around for accurate times of Earth orbit injection (ie, time of the first third stage shutdown) and the start and end of the trans-lunar injection burn. Has anyone seen these published anywhere, please?
609.2 (618.5 plan) First 3rd stage shutdown(...)1559 (1533 plan) Spacecraft separation
"The satellite will eventually be maneuvered into an orbit just 15 kilometers above the moon. At that point, Chang'E-2 will take pictures of moon's Bay of Rainbows area, the proposed landing site for Chang'E-3, with a resolution of 1.5 meters. The spatial resolution of Chang'E-1's CCD stereo camera was 120 meters, said Wu Weiren, chief designer of China's lunar orbiter project.
http://lunarnetworks.blogspot.com/2010/10/dispatch-from-change-2-sinus-iridium.htmlQuote"The satellite will eventually be maneuvered into an orbit just 15 kilometers above the moon. At that point, Chang'E-2 will take pictures of moon's Bay of Rainbows area, the proposed landing site for Chang'E-3, with a resolution of 1.5 meters. The spatial resolution of Chang'E-1's CCD stereo camera was 120 meters, said Wu Weiren, chief designer of China's lunar orbiter project.Interesting. I had not seen this before. 15km would be a really low, and very short lived orbit ?
Just curious... Other than secrecy, what is the reason for not putting their launch pads by the coast? With so much east-facing coastline, they should have plenty of potential launch sites that would cause much less problems from stages/parts coming down.
If you look at the map, it would be near impossible for the Chinese to launch rockets from the east coast without the risk of dropping stages on Taiwan, Korea or Japan. None of which would be politically acceptable.