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Photos Stream Back From China's Lunar Lander
After the successful soft landing of its carrier vessel on the surface of the moon, China's Jade Rabbit lunar rover has begun beaming back photos of the lunar surface. From the BBC's article, with links to video as well as several photos, comes this description: "Chang'e-3 is the third unmanned rover mission to touch down on the lunar surface, and the first to go there in more than 40 years. The last was an 840kg (1,900lb) Soviet vehicle known as Lunokhod-2, which was kept warm by polonium-210. But the six-wheeled Chinese vehicle carries a more sophisticated payload, including ground-penetrating radar which will gather measurements of the lunar soil and crust. The 120kg (260lb) Jade Rabbit rover can reportedly climb slopes of up to 30 degrees and travel at 200m (660ft) per hour. ... The rover and lander are powered by solar panels but some sources suggest they also carry radioisotope heating units (RHUs), containing plutonium-238 to keep them warm during the cold lunar night. According to Chinese space scientists, the mission is designed to test new technologies, gather scientific data and build intellectual expertise. It will also scout valuable mineral resources that could one day be mined."
That first photo makes me think they are coming back with tablets and commandments...
Gently reply
I heard that the Sea of Tranquility is now the South China Sea of Tranquility.
I'm really tired of the media and politicians dismissing our lack of investment in science and space exploration by belittling Chinese efforts. "Durp durp, we already done been to the Moon, you stupid backwards Chiners durp durp!".
It's a first step that they'll likely quickly capitalize on and while our media and government like to convince us that the Chinese are goofy little 50-years-later-runners-up, they're an economic and political powerhouse that will, if they decide to invest further in it, leapfrog our accomplishments by light years. And sooner rather than later.
If we don't get serious about doing it ourselves -- or even better, co-operating with scientists on an international scale for the betterment of everyone -- we're going to look like the back water yokels.
In addition to the Chinese moon-rover landing Iran is claiming a 2nd successful launch and recovery of a Rhesus macaque.
And Slashdot has already reported about India's Martian expedition.
There are some rocks of significant size immediately behind the rover. Those are certainly large enough for the rover to get hung on or to flip it over on its side. I'm surprised the lander touched down within just a few feet of rocks like that. Either their hazard avoidance system looks only directly beneath the footprint of the lander, or it failed to properly detect those rocks. Had it landed just 50% closer to those rocks, the ramp the rover descended would have been right on them..
Better known as 318230.
Is keeps Russian probes warm and turns Russian spys cold.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
They better be careful... We all remember what happened to the Tsien. Fortunately, this one is not manned...
Normally people buy flying toys from China and are happy to have them land without crashing. China brought a really big toy from Russia and was happy to not crash it. I think more congratulations should be directed to Russia than China. Russia has a thriving space program even if it is via proxy. Maybe America needs to take a page out of Russia's book and licence more tech to places like China to allow them to continue space exploration while America seems to lack the will. At least then if something does go wrong America could learn from it but be able to point fingers at China saying it was really their fault. Beta testing at it's finest.
It's time for those who insisted that the moon landing by the Apollo astronauts were fake to stop spreading their falsehood.
The moon pictures that the Yutu rover and the Chang'e 3 lander take look very much like the pictures that NASA provided us some 40-odd years ago - of course they can try to claim that these new batch of pictures are fake as well.
I do not understand why there are still people holding on to that kind of conspiracy theory. I just do not understand.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Pics or it didn't hap-... Uh, wait...
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
The same goes for China. Industrially, they're getting to where the US was in the mid-1800s. Their space technology is in the 1950s, and early 1960s. Socially, they're pre-1750s in many ways. Militarily, they're in the 1910s, at best
I certainly hope that you are NOT an American.
If you are, please, I beseech you, please WAKE THE FUCK UP.
America is in a steep decline, and the rate of decline has quicken in the past 2 decades.
And America's decline is in stark contrast with the rapid growth of Brazil, India and China.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Arthur C. Clarke... Space Oddyssey 2010. The chinese secretly constructed an interplanetary spacecraft in plan sight... saying it was a space station.
You really need to pay more attention. The Tsien landed on Europa three years ago. Unfortunately there was technical problems and contact with the lander was lost.
My congratulations to the scientists and engineers that made this mission work! A difficult job done well!
The radioactives used in RTG's are usually alpha emmitters that can be sheilded very easily - thin sheet metal is enough, let alone the whole carrier assembly. It's gamma rays that are the problem and require several feet of lead to shield fully. Chosing the right isotopes with a favourable decay chain reduces or eliminates gamma ray production.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator#Selection_of_isotopes
Here's the guy Clarke named the craft after: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsien_Hsue-shen (it's only in the book, not the movie, so you may be excused for not being aware).
Seriously, I'm glad somebody else is going into space. NASA seems to be doing well in deeper space - Mars rovers, missions far out into the solar system, and deep-space satellites - but we still have plenty to discover in our own backyard.
Even though the rocketry task has been done before (putting a rover on the moon) there's a hell of a lot of difference between a 1960's Soviet rover and a 2010's rover, so they're going to be uncovering plenty of new stuff.
1910s, huh?
You're a troll.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Grats to China!
Please go take pictures of the U.S Rovers and launch pads so the sales of books and DVD's that the USA never landed on the moon make them look like the foolish people they are :)
Big difference: China landings are driven by science and verifiable by high-tech equipment.
US Hollywood moon landings were driven by hate towards Russians who put first man in space.
Here I was expecting some troll to criticize the Chinese effort for being a copy of what was done 40+ years ago, or simply a stunt. Instead I find a troll saying "China landings are ... verifiable by high-tech equipment", thus implying that US efforts weren't. Are you a conspiracy nut suggesting the US landings were faked?
"China landings are driven by science ...". The science is great, but if you think that prestige and publicity aren't part of the reason for the Chinese effort, then I've got a bridge to sell you. I've also got no problem with that being part of the motivation.
"US Hollywood moon landings were driven by hate towards Russians who put first man in space." Wow, you've heard about the space race - a term that was coined at the time because it described the obvious. BTW, what do you think motivated the USSR? It wouldn't have been a race without at least two sides. However, "hate" is a ridiculously way to describe such a competition. Whatever you say about the motivation, the space race was a lot more peaceful than the arms race. A nice side effect was all the science done and the technology developed. Out of curiosity though, what was Hollywood about the moon landings? That they televised it? Not even Hollywood is that good - it got 125M viewers around the world. Maybe it had something to do with it being such an impressive and historic event, albeit a silly thing like the first time that people set foot on any body other than the earth.
P.S. You also overlook that this Chinese probe is more analogous to a Soviet mission of 40 years ago, than to the manned US landings, But hey, any idiotic excuse to bash the US, right?
You have to get out of orbit...you need to get to the moon....you need to get into lunar orbit and then land....successfully. Read the history of the Ranger Program to see how much work this took the US, and they were crashing onto the moon, not trying to land a working Rover. Getting the insertions correct is not easy. China has done something difficult and laudable. While I'm sure they had the full data from the US program, and the USSR program, making this happen is still a great achievement. I have noticed how the US media is paying little attention to this......
1. It's necessary, without it the equipment freezes and gets destroyed during the 2 week "night". 2. It's an insignificant amount of radiation compared to what the Sun is doing to the surface of the Moon. 3. You're surrounded by naturally occurring radioactive materials, stop freaking out every time someone mentions the word "radiation", or starts talking about "uranium", "radon", "polonium", "cesium", or "plutonium". These are useful materials if correctly handled and applied. Need I remind you that bananas are a source of concentrated Potassium 40.
Their space technology is in the 1950s, and early 1960s.
China has over one million people working on their space program. They have so much cash that they've been buying US Treasury Bills despite their dubious value and have recently stopped being so silly. They're building a moon base in the next decade and will be landing men on Mars in the 2030's.
Buy lots of cheap stuff at Walmart - it's fueling humanity's journey to the starts.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You could not fake radio messages from the moon. The signals where UHF, line of sight. Anyone with the equipment to receive it also had to point those antennas....triangulate......
It was a soundstage on mars.
The lander did not land in Sinus Iridum, but in Mare Imbrium proper.
I do not think this was a mistake, as they could have waited a few more orbits and made the original landing point in Sinus Iridum. For some reason, a site in Mare Imbrium was chosen. As the actual landing site is on the border between the Titanium rich and Titanium poor parts of Sinus Iridum, I suspect this was not an arbitrary choice, but driven by a desire to understand better the mineral resources of the Moon.
If we are really lucky, the rover will drive the 120 km North to Montes Recti, a mountain range to the North. (These mountains are really islands of old terrain high enough to avoid being submerged in the Mare Imbrium lava flows.) At 100 m/day, it would only take 3 years...
Maybe he wants them to line up in an orderly fashion to complain.
Hopefully the Chinese will release some high quality pictures. I'm not suggesting the moon landings were fake, but given the overall cost and engineering that goes into such an endeavor, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect photos of the same quality I can take with my cell phone.
I read that the first images we see now are low quality to keep transmission time low. The high quality ones, including full video of the decent, will follow.
The quality of those photos is terrible. What'd they do, send up a cheap digital camera made in chi...
Okay, enough of the bickering.
There is a page claiming that CNSA (China National Space Administration) will share all the data it gathers from both the Chang'e 3 lander and the Yutu rover with scientists from all nations.
http://io9.com/heres-what-chinas-yutu-rover-is-doing-on-the-moon-1483746967
I do not know if the CNSA really will share all the data it gathers with the world. Time will tell.
But if it does (and I hope it will), that will be a plus for humanity.
And I sincerely hope that the ISS will be open for China's involvement as well.
It is utterly stupid to play politics in space.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I always begin these by saying that, yes, I believe the moon landings are real.
That said, I would imagine the radio signals from the Moon would be the easiest part. Land a receiver and transmitter that just takes what it receives on one channel and broadcasts it back to Earth. If you take the live feed from NASA and send it to the astronauts who reply immediately, it will take the appropriate amount of time for NASA to receive the signal from the Moon and no one at NASA would be wiser (except for the conspirator who was making sure the live signal went to the astronauts).
It's a neat thing to think about--not whether they were faked but how could they have been faked. How much of a mission would you have to go through? I mean, we heard from Neil, Buzz, and Michael the whole trip out and then we heard from Buzz and Neil on the Moon. You could conceivably use a similar technique for voice communication, but the weightless part inside the capsule would be pretty tough to do on Earth. Did they do TV broadcasts from inside the capsule (like was shown on Apollo 13)? The capsule could have stayed in orbit--either Earth or lunar--but that would be tricky to sync up the movements of the fake moon-walking astronauts with the voices from the capsule.
One of the questions I have for the conspiracy nuts is what missions were faked? Only the Apollo missions? Assuming it was only the Apollo missions, then the Surveyor missions weren't faked and that shows that NASA could land equipment in the Moon. Were all the Apollo missions faked? Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 sent men around the Moon. Were those faked?
Space race was part of the arms race.
According to this page (which I do not know if the info is true or not)
http://io9.com/heres-what-chinas-yutu-rover-is-doing-on-the-moon-1483746967
it claims the following:
A. The Chang'e 3 lander has a powerful HD science cameras that can send at a rate of one image per second.
B. The Yutu rover will be sending high-definition images, including panoramas, back to Earth.
and
C. Ouyang Ziyuan, one of the chief scientists on the Chang'e-3 mission, said the in an interview: ( @ http://english.cntv.cn/program/newshour/20131130/102473.shtml )
"Number one: space observation from the moon. This is the dream of many astronomers because atmosphere, wind, snow and pollution don't obstruct visibility as they do on earth. The result is also better because of the longer periods of uninterrupted observation from the moon due to it orbiting the earth. One day of observation on the moon is equivalent to 14 days on earth.
Number two: we have an ultraviolet camera on the lander to monitor the earth. This camera is different from the one used by America's Apollo 16. Ours can see the formation of the earth's plasmasphere and its density change. It's better than a satellite, which can only record data section by section as it orbits around the earth. On the moon it can observe half of earth at a time without moving. This is something people have always wanted to do.
Number three: we will be the first to learn the structure and layers of the moon 100 meters below its surface with radars installed at the bottom of the rover. As the rover drives on the lunar surface, it will be as [if] it can cut and see what's 100 meters below. "
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Developing nations are generally doing some or all of the three:
1) Building their industrial base
2) Providing free or low cost education
3) Providing free or low cost health care
The United States is doing the opposite of that. Our infrastructure is crumbling, our lack of high speed rail is a joke, as is our lack of mass transit outside of a few major cities, and our internet and cell phone networks are a decade behind Europe's. More job-crushing trade laws are being pushed (TPP), getting a college degree means five or six figures of debt, and the trivial detail that Obomneycare will still leave the U.S. with the worst health care system in the industrialized world.
How are those trends sustainable for the United States, where 80% of the population is in poverty or a paycheck away from it?
I don't think the Chinese have the technology to fake a landing, so they had to do it for real.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
They may have a lot of people working on their space program but I find it hard to believe they have a million people working on it. SpaceX has been able to develop a launcher with capabilities similar to that of the Chinese launchers at a price that is also competitive and they've only got 2-3000 people working there. I know a space program is more than just a launcher but if the extra 997,000 people only gain you one lunar lander more than that you're doing something wrong.
Also, I'd like to see documentation on a concrete plan to build a moon base by 2023 because from what I understand of their program thats not going to happen.
Not to knock the Chinese because what they're doing is really impressive but if you want to indirectly fund humanity's journey to the stars I think you're better off buying a Tesla than some cheap stuff at Walmart. SpaceX has better odds of pushing the envelope in space than the Chinese in my opinion.
Let's be honest, anyone who still thought that the moon landings were fakes, isn't going to be convinced by this either.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Here's a clue: the space race was about sending both unmanned and manned missions into space, including earth orbit, the moon, and other planets. The arms race was about developing better ways to nuke the other side (though also likely suicidal).
Perhaps you meant to say that both were motivated by competition with, and hostility towards, the USSR, although it's hard to see how the space race was motivated by hostility, since it wasn't aggressive. Did they sometimes use similar technologies, like rockets? Yes, as indeed computers were also used for both. In other words, they were the same thing ... if you completely ignore the differences.
*Everything* and *everyone* is right here!
No, everything is not here, and quite possibly everyone is not here either. I will buy a ticket to see a sunrise on the moon, as soon as i can afford one.
But if you are happy with your seven continents and 2-dimensional map of the world, don't let yourself be bothered by the rest of us hoping to go see the stars.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
The transmissions used were line of site, VHF, the transmissions to the moon were followed by replies from the moon.
Both sides of the transmissions could be monitored by other nations, including the USSR who would have been VERY fast to call phony.
Also, the USSR had spacecraft that could listen in and could tell where it was all coming from, so because of the time of travel and source of the transmissions, the only way to fake it would be to have the entire thing prerecorded before launch.
But you would still have had to land the recordings and transmitter on the moon as well as send back the images of the moon, which would have to be faked ahead of time and sent to the moon.
Except that much storage didn't exist back then.
So no, it couldn't have been faked, unless the USSR and perhaps several other nations were in on it. I guess that part is possible, but frankly I think in 1969 it would have been easier to just send men to the moon than it would be to fake the whole thing and get the USSR on board.
That, plus I've personally met two of the moon astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and Gene Cernan. I met Buzz only briefly, however I've spoken with Gene for more than an hour about his experiences.
He could be lying, but frankly, I believe him and I don't think you'd get those 12 men to lie about it for as long as it has been.
The space race about using the populations' egos to justify spending immense resources on improving military space technology.
The US has since made it very clear that whoever controls the skies controls the battlefield (unless it's insurgents in urban areas). Space is just a sky above the sky, and controlling that was believed to be the key to beating the other guy, when ICBMs were in their infancy.
All false yet marked insightful, this is why /. is crap these days.
1. Please give the source for one million people working on their space program. Also I think it should be obvious to anyone with project management experience that more people doesn't equal more work gets done, it's usually the opposite
2. They buy US Treasury Bills because they are running a trade surplus against the US by manipulating the exchange rate, if they have enough cash they wouldn't need to do this. And China is not the only one buying US Treasury Bills, Japan/Brazil/Taiwan/etc all have sizable holdings, so saying it has dubious value is simply false.
3. As for moon base, just because they are raising the possibility does not mean it will happen, US private companies plus Russian and Japan also released plans for moon base. And China have not officially released any plan regarding manned Mars missions.
So if you're an American, stop buying craps from China and support American companies such as SpaceX, this is the best bet to see humans on Mars.
No it's not 40 year old tech.
People drove a car on my route to work perhaps 70 or 80 years ago. But that doesn't mean my Honda Civic is 80 year old tech. While the outcome is the same and the principles are the same, the technology used to make that journey now is quite different.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Perhaps delivering high resolution images to US/ Western geeks is not their primary mission. Perhaps a few low res snapshots to keep the western media off their back (see, we really did it, put away your conspiracy theory stories) is all they felt obliged to do.
Maybe there's a high res camera sending pictures back to their scientific research / military people and they just don't feel the need to distribute this material to the general public in other countries. The Chinese funding model might not be the same as the USA's, maybe they don't need to distribute high res holiday snaps to ensure continued funding.
Perhaps there's no high res camera on board because the science of the mission doesn't need any more than a few low res snaps. The real work might be elsewhere. I've read a couple of articles that note that the lander is much bigger than you might expect for a rover of this size, so it might be the real mission here is to test lander technologies in preparation for sending a manned mission. It might be that the real science is around testing that platform, and the rover is just supplementary, a nice addition for extra kudos and you might as well do it while you're there.