The Chinese Academy of Sciences was founded in 1949 and is China’s leading research institution, with more than a hundred institutes across every field of science. Several of them design and operate space missions, separately from CNSA.
CAS built the DRO-A and DRO-B satellites, which were rescued after a launch failure in 2024 and now orbit the Moon in a distant retrograde orbit, forming, with a third satellite near Earth, the world’s first constellation spanning Earth-Moon space.
1 mission tracked