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China's Nuclear Rover Will Sample the Moon
HansonMB writes "After launching on one of the nation's Long March rockets and a three-day transit, Chang'E 3 will reach the Moon and enter into a 62 mile orbit. Once settled, the 2,645 pound lander will separate from the roughly 8,200 pound spacecraft and descend into a highly elliptical orbit 62 by 9.5 miles above the surface." Russia wants a taste, too, and plans a moon-sampling mission set for 2015.
Why send humans when you can just send robots.
Chinese then sample the Rover on return.
>>> After launching on one of the nation's Long March rockets and a three-day transit, Chang'E 3 will reach the Moon and enter into a 62 mile orbit. ...or it will make a fantastic explosion someplace in China.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq9iYyBYJMI
It will have to take another one an hour later.
Why are they landing a "lander" on an elliptical orbit instead of the surface of the moon? Did this come from the Siri Translator?
Table-ized A.I.
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So, they're planning to send a lander to Arizona to sample our desert?
A year or so ago I was perusing the made-in-china web site and found a page where you could buy a Long March missile booster and launching platform (included payload nacelle but no payload, bring your own fuel). The part I found most disconcerting was the little "add to basket" icon...
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Pretty soon they'll be setting up mines and factories, it will become as smoggy as Beijing, and everyone will have to wear masks to go outside.
The Chang'E 3 lander will rely on a plutonium-238 radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG, for power. This is the same type of unit that's currently powering Curiosity's traverse across Mars. But unlike Curiosity, Chang'E 3 will only use its RTG to keep the spacecraft's systems humming during the two-week long lunar nights. Solar panels will allow the lander to take advantage of the free power during the two-week long lunar days.
I thought that once you put together an RTG, its lifespan was limited only by the radiation source and the degradation of the thermocouples.
So what's the purpose of not using the RTG all the time?
Will that extend its life?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Sorry, we can't run this story as it is not a duplicate of another story already run.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
"The Chang'E 3 lander will rely on a plutonium-238 radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG, for power."
Taken from the 5th paragraph of the article.
This is NOT powered by a full blown nuclear reactor. Would it really hurt to make this clear in the post?
Patrick McGoohan will eventually escape.
wake me when there is a moon base, or something that hasn't been done already.
You can go into your profile, view your submissions, and see which ones were accepted or rejected.
IF you can see them. I've posted a submission once and if I hadn't kept its URI, I would never have been able to return back to it, since the system pretended it had never existed.
Ezekiel 23:20
This is the kind sausage measuring contest that societies do at their peak.
Like the US, they will spend trill/bill/millions to take pictures of rocks in a vacuum then spend decades reminiscing about the good old days when they were launching rockets to the moon and beyond.
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Russions put "rovers" on the moon in the 60s and 70s. No one noticed cus we put men on the moon just before that.
Cheese is good - reports china
me and 2 playboy ladies and ill go anywhere regardless of the tan i get
Once settled, the 2,645 pound lander will...descend into a highly elliptical orbit 62 by 9.5 miles above the surface.
I assume it does something after that...
And are the Chinese going to be using miles and pounds while they mission-control this?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Let the Rare-Moon metals land-rush begin....
Why send humans when you can just send robots
This just reveals a lack of imagination. Yes we've been delayed so far in getting to space, but robots are going to pave the way for an exponential explosion of humans in space. We'll soon be able to do things like send teams of robots in advance to do automated construction of infrastructure (eg. build housing, build automated greenhouses, build solar mini-stations, and this is just with technology that we'll see within the next 15 to 30 years), that will make it easier and cheaper to send large numbers of people to Mars. We're just warming up, the days of humans in space are about to begin.
My other UID is three digits.
Info I gather from this link: http://www.cas.cn/zt/hyzt/16thysdh/zb/
and from this slide: http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetaryblog/8343205291/in/photostream
Rough translation:
"From 2017 onward, after the completion of China's unmanned lunar missions, China will embark on manned missions to the moon and also to build a permanent lunar base"
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Colonize space? Why? 3/4 of our planet is ocean, how about colonize that first? Deserts? Hint: it will be much cheaper and possible with today's technology without major sacrifices. So... where are the underwater cities, etc? No takers?
Because governments are too close?
For example, when the Republic of Minerva attempted to create an independent micronation by colonizing an area of the ocean, the US paid Tonga to claim it for the Kingdom of Tonga so the millionaires who were trying to found it couldn't get out from under existing national sovereignties.
For a lot of people willing to fly away to the far reaches of space, the limiting factor has always been the cost of getting out of the gravity well in the first place. The DC-X (Delta Clipper) would have remedied this, but it was killed off McDonnell Douglas as part of them being eaten by Boeing, in favor of the National Aerospace plane, which never materialized, and would have needed runways and to boost additional equipment to do landings out there, where there are no runways for the plane to use (an intentional limitation of the plane).
I can understand governments being wary of cheap access to space (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment#Project_Thor should probably not be put in practical reach of well to do Facebook emloyees, and more than you'd want them to have tactical nuclear weapons at their disposal).
That it would cost a whole hell of a lot for a cat's paw to fly up and try to claim the territory out from under them is a major advantage of basing something like this in space, and therefore a major draw to colonization efforts there.
There are also people even crazier than that who believe that it's mankind's Manifest Detiny to expand to fill the solar system, and from there the nearby stars, then on to the galaxy, and then on to the rest of the universe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny .
Either way, it means either getting rid of the small minds in the way, or working around them. Local end runs, like Minerva, have failed, and if you are just going to be an extension of an existing nation, and are in the top 1% of wealth there anyway, you can be a hell of a lot more comfortable under their thumb without going anywhere than you can be doing subsistence fish-farming on a floating city in the middle of the Pacific being a damn sight less comfortablr, and then finding yourself *still* under their thumb anyway.
Colonies are built by political refugees, economic refugees, indentured servants, disinherited heirs, bastard progeny, and, in general, people looking for a better life than the one they have now. For everyone in the middle class and higher, that's basically unavailable here on Earth, "better" being a relative term, and with orbital costs being artificially inflated, anyone below that level of wealth can't hope to go anywhere, except local regional border crossings, in the hope of a better life.
So you get a bunch of nerds, in the middle class and higher, where do you think they will be pointing their colony ships, Antarctica? It might work, but you are more likely to get booted off by whoever "protects" that section of Antarctica from someone doing that under the Antarctic Treaty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty which was designed to prevent something like that ever happening.
The closest you're going to get on-planet is taking over an existing state, and Charles Taylor pretty much nailed the door shut on that in 1960: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Taylor_(Liberia)
yeah, haha or whooosh :)
This may be why the communists are making the trip - 'Between 1969 and 1972, Apollo astronauts brought just under 842 pounds of rocks and regolith back from the Moon. In 1985, engineers at the University of Wisconsin discovered significant amounts of Helium-3 in the lunar soil. Helium-3 is a stable isotope of helium — the gas we use to fill party balloons with — and is notable because it’s missing a neutron, an important property that means we can used it in nuclear fusion reactions to produce clean energy. Unfortunately, our most plentiful stores of the isotope are a quarter of a million miles away.' http://news.discovery.com/space/space-energy-mining-the-moon-120907.htm
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
Read the article, recognize it as important but... Yeah, first thing I thought of when the headline said sample was eat. Leading me to think of some Chinese mad scientist that's send out sattelites across the solar system to eat the very Heavens. The he will be The True Celestial! BWAHAHAHA
Could the text be in metric ? I find it annoying to go and convert x pounds of things in meters every time an article is added.
Once settled, the 2,645 pound lander will separate from the roughly 8,200 pound spacecraft and descend into a highly elliptical orbit 62 by 9.5 miles above the surface
2,645 GBP (4,225.29 USD)? That's bloody cheap, it used to cost millions.
Finally, the faked moon landings will be shown for what they are and we can find out what kind of cheese the moon is really made of.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
slight correction
Table-ized A.I.
The Russians launched a series of probes in the 70s (Luna 16, Luna 20 and Luna 24) that went to the moon and brought back samples.
Although I guess the novel thing this time is that it combines the Luna sample return missions with the Lunokhod rovers.