Written by: Wei Mingchuan & Ji Xing
Edited by: William Mosteller
Translated by: Zhou Dongyi
"Everyone looks up at tonight's moon." For HITers, the moon during this year's Mid-Autumn Festival had an extraordinary meaning. “I miss someone when someone is missing me.” When we looked up at the bright moon, the micro-satellite "Longjiang No. 2", independently developed by Harbin Institute of Technology, was flying around the moon, looking back at the lights of its hometown on earth, its motherland, and HITers from far away.
At 22:00 on May 25, 2018, "Longjiang No. 2" successfully entered the lunar orbit, becoming the first micro-satellite in the world to independently complete the earth-moon transfer, near-moon braking, and circumlunar flight. Harbin Institute of Technology has thus become the first university in the world to send a microminiature probe into lunar orbit.
Photo of the earth and moon taken by the Saudi camera equipped with the "Longjiang 2" microsatellite
Photo of the lunar surface area captured by the student team's miniature CMOS camera
Flying to the moon (photo by Deng Dekuan)
