I’ve been contacted by Wataru Torii of the JAXA Ham Radio Club regarding the OMOTENASHI project which plans to launch a moon orbiter and lander late August for arrival at the moon in early September. Wataru Torii works at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The landing device is very small and the entire system orbiter and lander is only 6U CubeSat dimensions.
The issue they face is that earlier launches were planned such that their agency would be able to hear the devices when the lander was due to reach the moon’s surface. Unfortunately the launch date has been put off several times and is now due for 29/8/22. It may land on the moon on 4/9/22 at 2:45UTC to 3:30UTC at which time it will not be visible from Japan so they are hoping to enlist the support of Australian and New Zealand amateurs to record and monitor the orbiter and lander. As the landing may be quite hard they are especially interested in loss of signal and any recordings prior to this, preferably from SDRs for the frequency range 437.31 (orbiter) and 437.41 (the lander). They are using PSK31.
All the details are available on their website:
https://www.isas.jaxa.jp/home/omotenashi/JHRCweb/jhrc.html
Timings and our window is all dependent on the launch being on the 29th of August.
Reasonably good satellite systems should be able to hear the 1W signals. If you are interested in helping send me an email (john at vk5dj dot com) and I’ll send you the contact address for Wataru.
John
VK5DJ