China's lunar exploration program has developed and progressed for more than 13 years. Over this time, Precise Orbit Determination (POD) has guaranteed successful execution of the Chang’e missions, and is the basis for further scientific investigations using radio science data; for example, recovering the lunar gravity field to explore the inner structure and detect craters to study the evolutionary history of the moon. This study briefly reviews the Chang’e series mission orbit and radio tracking measurements. We reprocessed the tracking data and comprehensively summarized the evolution of the POD accuracy and the tracking system precision from the Chang’e 1 to Chang’e 4 missions using in‐house software. Our results show a progression of the tracking station, as the first Chang’e 1 mission only reached several millimeters per second level accuracy in the Doppler measurements and several meters level accuracy for the two‐way range measurements. Later on the accuracy of Chang’e 5T1 Doppler measurements reached about 0.35 mm/s and the accuracy of the Chang’e 3 two‐way range measurements below 0.7 m. Moreover, the newest Chang’e 4 relay satellite achieved POD residuals Root Mean Square for the two‐way range less than a meter and orbital accuracy at 200 m level, in contrast to meters level residual and the half‐kilometer level accuracy achieved during the Chang’e 1 mission. We can clearly see that the POD performance of the Chang’e spacecraft continuously improved. This research study is a reference for future Chinese Lunar exploration missions, as well as Chinese Mars and asteroid explorations.

Tianwen-1 is China’s first independent interplanetary exploration mission, targeting Mars, and includes orbiting, landing, and rover phases. Similar to previous Mars missions, the Tianwen-1 orbiter was designed for polar orbits during the scientific mission period but has an exceptional eccentricity of approximately 0.59. We provide the first independent eight-degree Martian gravity field model in this paper, which was developed exclusively by a team working in China with our independent software as well, based on about two months of radiometric Doppler and range data from only the Tianwen-1 mission. This model is independent from the models created by the groups at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center in the United States, as well as the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales in France. Furthermore, in order to optimize the engineering and scientific benefits, we proposed a number of potential orbits for the extended Tianwen-1 mission. In order to solve a higher-degree independent Mars gravity field model, the viability of modifying the perigee height was investigated, with the priority considerations of fuel savings and implementation hazards being controlled.

The Martian gravity field is a key data set for studying the internal structure of Mars. For this purpose, we processed all the two-way Doppler tracking data of the Tianwen-1 orbiter from 2021 June to 2024 October and determined a new degree and order 80 Martian static gravity field model, TW80. The Tianwen-1 orbiter tracking data show high accuracy, with approximately 90% of arcs achieving an rms of residuals of less than 0.1 mm s^–1. We evaluated this model in terms of gravity anomaly errors, gravity/topography correlation, and orbit determination performance. The TW80 gravity field model reaches a global resolution of degree and order 74, corresponding to a spatial resolution of approximately 140 km. The rms of the gravity anomaly errors is approximately 35.8 mGal, with notably smaller errors near the south pole region in the southern hemisphere and larger errors in mid- and low-latitude regions. The TW80 model shows a high correlation with topography and is consistent with the MRO120D gravity field model up to degree 40. Due to the highly elliptical orbit geometry, the orbit determination performance of the TW80 model for the Tianwen-1 orbiter is comparable to that of the MRO120D model, with radial differences less than 100 m and total position differences less than 500 m. Further improvements in orbit determination accuracy will focus on precise modeling of orbital maneuvers and the solar radiation pressure model, as well as extending the tracking duration of individual arcs.