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Chang'e-3 Lunar Rover Landing Slated For 13:40 UTC Saturday
savuporo writes "The Chinese Chang'e-3 probe will be landing on the moon [Saturday], 13:40 UTC. CCTV is likely to carry the event live as they did for initial launch. According to technical overview of the mission scenario and instruments, the landing will be fully autonomous with active landing hazard avoidance, which is the first time this has been attempted on any planetary landing. More real-time updates can be found on Twitter with ChangE3 hash tag and NASASpaceFlight forums live event section."
Place your bets on something going wrong. Cause you know, China is known for things that explode or catch fire that shouldn't.
I hoping them the best, sry.
Become part of the action :)
http://moonlander.seb.ly/
"the first time this has been attempted on any planetary landing." The moon is a planet? When did that happen?
So will people claim this moon landing is fake too?
Place your bets on something going wrong. Cause you know, China is known for things that explode or catch fire that shouldn't.
I hoping them the best, sry.
I hope that the fruit of human space exploration would be share to all countries in the world.
It makes no sense to play politics in space.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
There's some good live coverage of it here as of right now: http://english.cntv.cn/live/p2p/index.shtml
When are you free?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
We're all counting on you.
Pretty amazing to see such technological ability spreading around the world -- India going to Mars, and China going to the Moon. I can hope the dream of space settlement will grow in those and other countries and we will see space habitats eventually.
Maybe China will be the first to realize the ideas described in this Carter-era study?
"Advanced Automation for Space Missions"
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You sir, are a racist dick.
Let me guess, you are American and know that only Americans can build space vechicles right?
Remember that time that NASA totally fucked up a Mars probe because they were too stupid to use metric?
Remember that time that NASA fucked up the Hubble telescope because they were too stupid to make sure the optics were correct before shooting into space? Geez, seems like all NASA does is fuck things up!
Of course, I know it is not true that they only fuck things up, but I am making a point.
China, despite your ignorant racist views is every bit as advanced as 'Murrica or Russia. Maybe you should think about going there. Maybe should consider leaving your basement and going to ANY other country.
Congratulations on the first successful lunar landing of the century China!
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Was watching the live streaming.
Landing is a success !!
Congratulation !!!!!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The landing has been successful! Yeah, humans!
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
They are unfolding the solar panel now...
Comments by me on how China's government is led now by engineers vs. US led now by lawyers: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4550453&cid=45688539
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You sir, are a racist dick
I came from China, I am an ethnic Chinese, and I am an American (naturalized citizen).
Sir, please calm down. Don't get too work up.
I am happy that the lander landed successfully - not because of I'm a Chinese but because this landing marks another milestone for human space exploration.
Have a good day !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
+informative
To watch the live feed I'm being asked to install CNTVLive2 plugi
http:/// player . cntv . cn /flashplayer/config/plugins/npCNTVLive2_Linux_64.xpi
I think not.
There seems to be a custom compression algorithm used for
http://player.cntv.cn/flashplayer/logo/Loading.swf?v=2012.11.28.1&v=0.3890230686354875la
mplayer/xine/vlc don't like it.
In Firefox and Chromium it shows a loading page but stops at 80-something percent.
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/one-giant-leap-kerbalkind-spaceflight-sim-wins-geek-gift-award-2D11741994
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerbal_Space_Program
https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/contact.php
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
CCTV's live coverage showed a textbook landing and solar array deployment, including some very shiny live pictures from the descent imager. Next steps are self-testing, instrument deployment and releasing the rover, which they've said will take up to 24 hours. Although I'd imagine that they'll release images from the panoramic mast camera as soon as possible.
Congratulations
There are lots of other minor issues - bureaucracy, risk aversion, aging workforce.
I may be an American citizen but I came from China. I still keep track of what's going on inside China.
From what I know, all the problems that you've outlined above China also got them.
Bureaucracy
You just couldn't imagine how bureaucratic the Chinese system is
Risk Aversion
Do you know why China's space program schedule is limited to one-spaceship every year ?
You guess it, risk aversion
Aging workforce
All the leading scientists in Chinese space programs are in their 60's, and older. That is because China practically lost an entire generation of scientist due to the social upheaval during the 1950's to the 1970's.
Yes, a new generation of young scientists are growing up, but they are still seriously lacking in practical experiences.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
1) "Chinese" is a NATIONALITY.
Excuse me.
The word "Chinese" is never mean to be a "nationality".
I am an American by nationality but I am still a Chinese. I was born in China, grew up in China until my teens before I went to America.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Good points with the historical analogy to ocean-going explorations and later commerce. CCTV was talking about the implications of the China landing as I started to write this, and putting it into the context of past efforts by other countries like the USA and USSR. But they are making a big point about how nothing much has landed for 37 years that could do local experimented and take local high-definition images,,,
They are just ending their live coverage it seems...Nice to see a recap of the landing video as I was posting on slashdot while listening, and didn't realize how quick it was going to happen after the final deceleration burn, and missed seeing the actual video of the moment of landing at the time... The headline said the landing would happen about twenty minutes or so later than it did so I thought it would take longer...
The next CCTV show is up and talking more about the historical context right now... They are talking about how US President Carter gave China one gram of moon rock and they used half of it for research...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
They are on to other stuff there now after finishing the live coverage (which was great to listen to)... They seem to be planning to have updates and further discussion during the day though...
One thing I found confusing in the coverage was distinguishing between what were live images and what were simulations... I did not know if some of the images were coming from perhaps other lunar satellites with cameras focused on the landing probe? Or if they were simulations or infographics tracking real positions?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Place your bets on something going wrong. Cause you know, China is known for things that explode or catch fire that shouldn't.
I hoping them the best, sry.
It is not enough to read manuals on Chinglish language, now rover have a Chinglish name too :-/
On holding onto optimism about change: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm .
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth.
Let's go back a hundred years. A revolution to overthrow the tsar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers, but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Given the Russian Revolution, who could have predicted Stalin's deformation of it, or Khrushchev's astounding exposure of Stalin, or Gorbachev's succession of surprises? Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II-the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?
And then the post-war world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, which Stalin himself had given little chance. And then the break with the Soviet Union, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone. No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere's Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent Uganda.
Spain became an astonishment. A million died in the civil war, which ended in victory for the Fascist Franco, backed by Hitler and Mussolini. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone. In other places too, deeply entrenched dictatorships seemed suddenly to disintegrate -- in Portugal, Argentina, the Philippines, Iran.
. .
Consider the remarkable transformation, in just a few decades, in people's consciousness of racism, in the bold presence of women demanding their rightful place, in a growing public awareness that gays are not curiosities but sensate human beings, in the long-term growing skepticism about military intervention despite brief surges of military madness. It is that long-term change that I think we must see if we are not to lose hope. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it repro
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Don't play the laughing boy. There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Great example; the same is true of people living in harsh climates like snowy areas -- or even, like on slashdot of people giving each other technological advice yet probably working in competing companies. One might even see that in a marriage -- with spouses working together when a child is sick yet also squabbling over housework... Life is at the interface of fire and ice, meshwork and hierarchy, competition and cooperation...
Politics is a process of resource allocation by discussion (backed ultimately by violence and also gift-giving or its withdrawal), as opposed to, say, mainstream US capitalist/consumer economics which is about resource allocation by moving the digital equivalent of pieces of artificially-scarce green paper around (within a larger US political context, as above backed by violence and gift-giving or its withdrawal). Yet, there is no reasons those communications and currencies could not be emails and IRC chats and bug tracker pstings, like coordinates much of Debian GNU/Linux.
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/04/14/1349202/study-reports-on-debian-governance-social-organization
So, it is not unreasonable to say that wherever human go, they will take some aspects of all that along. My father travelled the world as a merchant marine sailor for about twenty years, and one of his favorite sayings was a variation on "wherever you go, you take yourself along".
Yet. I think there is a deeper issue like mentioned in my sig. China has demonstrated new technologies of abundance by putting a robot on the moon powered by solar and nuclear technologies. Those technologies could produce physical abundance for all by today's standards -- even for trillions of people via self-replicating space habitats. That is a new truth. It can be a new truth even if probably humans may always find things to squabble about, like two kids in a room filled with toys can fight over the same one for whatever reasons of the moment.
Yet, such new technologies in a way make the world a smaller place, like the how the US space program to put a man on the moon in the 1960s was seen in US government as only justified in getting lots of funding in order to show the USSR that the USA was capable of landing a nuclear missile on Red Square. So many technologies can make the world smaller and smaller relative to our capacity to use such technologies to cause harm, like I write about here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
We may always have competition between people for various reasons (the mating dance?), yet our society can still figure out ways to structure that competition in healthier ways.
"No contest: the case against competition"
http://www.shareintl.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
----
"We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These word
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"The greatest threat to power is not violence but disengagement [from the grid network]."
Interesting point, AC. It relates to this, also by Howard Zinn:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncomrev24.html
"However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.
That will happen, I think, only when all of us who are slightly privileged and slightly uneasy begin to see that we are like the guards in the prison uprising at Attic -- expendable; that the Establishment, whatever rewards it gives us, will also, if necessary to maintain its control, kill us."
Or this by Noam Chomsky: ... There's a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, "why not us?" ..."
"The Threat of a Good Example"
http://www.chomsky.info/books/unclesam01.htm
"No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria.
And by Bucky Fuller:
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/165737.Richard_Buckminster_Fuller
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
So yes, withdrawing support is a powerful way of change, as Gandhi used:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyagraha
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-cooperation_movement
"The Non-Cooperation Movement was a significant phase of the Indian struggle for freedom from British rule. It was led by Mahatma Gandhi and was supported by the Indian National Congress. After the Jallianwala Bagh incident, Gandhi started the Non Cooperation movement. It aimed to resist British occupation in India through non-violent means. Protestors would refuse to buy British goods, adopt the use of local handicrafts, picket liquor shops, and try to uphold the Indian values of honor and integrity. The ideals of Ahimsa or non-violence, and Gandhi's ability to rally hundreds of thousands of common citizens towards the cause of Indian independence, were first seen on a large scale in this movement through the summer 1920, they feared that the movement might lead to popular violence.
Among the significant causes of this movement were colonial oppression, exemplified by the Rowlatt Act and Jallianwala Bagh massacre, economic hardships to the common man due to a large chunk of Indian wealth being exported to Britain, ruin of Indian artisans due to British factory-made goods replacing handmade goods, and popular resentment with the British over Indian soldiers dying in World War I while fighting as part of the British Army, in battles that otherwise had nothing to do with India."
Or as a twist, would it really matter if most of India's wealth were exported to Britain or to a 1% of Indians who live in gated communities inside India?
Consider the US
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
From what I have read, the American flags are completely white now due to the intense UV.
The budgets NASA is receiving is an order of magnitude bigger than anything Chinese are spending on their space programs. In fact, NASA budget still eclipses every other national civil space budget combined. 17 billion dollars is a lot of dough.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
They intentionally landed quite a long way from any of the Apollo sites, in case something went wrong during descent. They didn't want to effectively bomb one of those sites, even by accident.
It remains to be seen what the longevity of the rover will be. It is solar powered, so if they're patient and it was constructed very very well to keep the lunar dust out of moving parts, in theory they could drive that far. They would set a roving distance record if they did. Possibly a very LONG record, since there are no roads and the crater rims make for very rough terrain. Even finding a navigable route that far would be tough.
UTC is the time in Greenwich, which is in England. You can't really get any *more* English.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
on the other hand, if they are successful, then maybe, just maybe, the US will get off it's arse and send something interesting.
Nitpicking: there is a slight difference between UTC and GMT.
However it is indeed a shame that your parent either does not know what UTC is or in what/which time zone he is living.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I thought there was only a difference of an hour during DST months, which December is not... at least not in the northern hemisphere.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Mainly yes, but I would not bet on leap seconds and other time issues. Time is tricky (as a software engineer, I usually have all manuals open all the time when I have to deal with time, you forget to easy to often some detail).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm hurt. . Gonna go do a load. .
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
It remains to be seen what the longevity of the rover will be
The rover is supposed to last for only 3 months. The lander, 1 year.
The Chinese are not planning on having a long-lasting Curiosity-type rover on the moon, for they will send another one up there pretty soon (in 2 years, or so) and then another one (to take samples back to earth) and after that they may start sending Taikonauts (Chinese Astronauts) to the moon and may even build a moon base (or two, or three, or more).
That's their plan anyway.