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Chinese Chang'e-3 Lunar Rover On Its Way After Successful Launch
savuporo writes "The Chang'e-3 lunar probe, which includes the Yutu or Jade Rabbit buggy, blasted off on board an enhanced Long March-3B carrier rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 1:30 a.m. (12.30 p.m. EDT). Landing is expected on December 14, at a landing site called Sinus Iridium (the Bay of Rainbows), a relic of a huge crater 258 km in diameter. Coverage of the launch was carried live on CCTV, with youtube copies available."
It is much more challenging to do tele-operated rovers on Mars
Nobody disputed that. A rover on the moon however is a different thing than a rover on the Mars. First, its on an entirely different celestial body - hey, there are scientific discoveries there, and potential for development. Second, teleoperated rover on the moon will have substantially different capabilities compared to martian ones - instead of 10 minute signal lag, you have 1-2 seconds, and can actually do things interactively.
A rover on mars and a rover on moon are different things and one is not "more or less" than another. US, or "west", have done one, but not the other.
And before you jump back with "but we had men there" - again, men on the moon are a different capability than having a long lasting rover there. Chang'e-3 mission is designed for 3 months, and it will carry out continuous observations with its instruments. Thats a tall order for any human crew for a long time to come.
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That will be the critical point. If someone takes a serous shot at a manned mars mission for example, will the US space race revive, or will we just decide that we could but don't want to. For a while we've been letting the Russians launch our astronauts into space, something that would have been unthinkable when I was growing up.