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China's Jade Rabbit Lunar Rover Officially Declared Lost
An anonymous reader writes "'Jade Rabbit,' the first lunar rover successfully deployed by China, has now been officially declared 'lost.' The rover encountered problems on January 25th, just over a month into its planned three-month mission. 'The rover's mechanical problems are likely related to critical components that must be protected during the cold lunar night. When temperatures plunge, the rover's mast is designed to fold down to protect delicate instruments, which can then be kept warm by a radioactive heat source. Yutu also needs to angle a solar panel towards the point where the sun will rise to maintain power levels. A mechanical fault in these systems could leave the rover fatally exposed to the dark and bitter cold.'"
Someone mentioned here how spiffy it would be to send a 1kg-class lander to the Moon, while I disagreed. Now here's another reason why that's a bad idea, one that didn't occur to me at the time: the volume vs. surface ratio, and thermal management in those extreme conditions.
Ezekiel 23:20
Nice and strong signal from Yutu: http://www.moonviews.com/2014/02/yutu-rover-has-phoned-home-from-the-moon.html
Can the deployment be successful if the object deployed failed the majority of its mission objectives?
China is ascending the learning curve. Space provides a lot of tough problems. I wonder how many more visits NASA will be getting in the future, both official, and "unofficial"?
NASA's Strict Rules for Talking to and Working with China
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
It was made with cheap American parts!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Their mission had been going so well until the failure. It had been looking like it would be a good promotional piece for the Chinese, now it's just another failed space mission.
Well, not a complete failure. They did get there, and the rover was working for quite some time.
Ah well, could have been worse. Could have just failed utterly like that Mars launch a few years back. I forget who did that one.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I'm not dead yet! https://twitter.com/uhf_satcom...
Just shows the difficulty of developing a space probe from scratch. By keeping a steady stream of probes going to Mars, the probe teams at JPL stay in practice, and good probe designs come about. Starting out with a small Mars probe in the late 90s, and steadily growing bigger was a good path.
The US space program had all sorts of problems early on - a bunch of Ranger probes failed. The key was that they kept trying until it worked.
Will China keep trying until they get it right, or will they decide that space is too hard?
This is going to be great!
I'll be able to open the first junkyard on the Moon at this rate =)
The Jade Rabbit is nothing compared to the "junk" left all over the moon by the Apollo Missions. Even the Soviets left more crap on the moon than China.
In this respect it's still USA #1 with China nor any other country not even close to ever catching up.
That's going to be an interesting PayPal claim.
If we colonize Mars, it won't be the World Wide Web anymore. UWW?
Nah. The money's in bringing it back.
As I pointed out on the story on Israel doing a moon mission last week, the technology and knowledge required to put an (unmanned) 100kg object on the moon (or Mars, or other celestial rock) is very well understood these days, so much so that well-financed private corporations (see the various X-prise competitors) can do it, given $100m or less. All the engineering issues are both well-known, and well-documented as to solutions. This is all out in the open press, so anyone with the capital merely has to hire enough competent engineers, and have enough money to build the resulting design. Rocket science is no longer rocket science.
What remains extraordinarily difficult is for someone to build a long-functioning probe. The knowledge of the practical problems (and their workaround/solutions) has NOT been disseminated, and thus, pretty much everyone has to learn from scratch. Extraterrestrial probe building is still very much a Deep Magic field, with only a select few organizations (mostly NASA, but ESA too) having the experience to do it well. And they're not sharing.
I fully expect the Chinese to get a working lander robot sometime soon. Just like I fully expect that their next one will not work to its design specs, either. In many ways, it's like building a new car from scratch - the first couple of prototypes crash badly, and you have to learn all the tricks by yourself, because nobody else shares their hard-won info with you. Tesla does well because they were able to hire experienced people from Ford, etc. who brought that knowledge with them. The Chinese Space Agency (CNSA) wasn't able to do that, for obvious reasons, so they're going to have to do the whole learning curve themselves. Good news is that they'll do it MUCH faster than anyone else did, if for no other reason that the tech and general science knowledge is more available and understood.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
It is better to have roved and lost than to have never roved at all.
God spoke to me
I don't know what koolaid you guys have been drinking, but Chinese news says the rabbit has waked up.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
I guess it's some really tenacious stuff, and very abrasive.
On board the LEM the astronauts took out rocks to look at them, the dust was so fine it got under their finger nails and took several weeks to grow out.
- Harrison H. Schmitt (Apollo 17)
pic
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
I'm as patriotic as the next guy - "go team USA" and all that - but I'm sad to hear that your rover is lost.
Space is not a zero-sum game. My country has decided that we're more interested in spending the dollars (that we constantly borrow from you) on social welfare programs, caring for old people, and floating eleven carrier groups in a world that doesn't have a single other navy that could fight ONE of them.
I'm looking forward to your next space accomplishment, as I truly believe such things help ALL people, ultimately.
-Styopa
Stop whining and get your concepts straight. The US still leads pretty much everybody in advanced technology. China is playing catchup. They're playing a good game - not terribly surprising as their economy is pretty much the same size as ours and they have a more than a few smart, hardworking people. Yes, they steal our intellectual property. We steal theirs (and everybody else's). Get used to it.
However, they are world leaders in literally bulldozing the opposition. The major reason we can't build a high speed train between anywhere where you would want to build a high speed train is that there are things in the way. Buildings, roads and other annoyances. In China a few bribes and some physical / emotional threats to the less enthusiastic folks and you're there. In the US, where we still follow the rule of law most of the time, not so much.
The world is a complicated place. Certainly the shine on America is wearing off - it always was a thin layer of chrome. Happens to every society and civilization. China may be ascendant but it is not clear just how high they will go. China has a long, very long history of ups and downs.
Stay tuned.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The US leads everybody in their belief in astrology, and their disbelief in evolution as scientific fact.
The government is dominated by individuals that care more about enhancing their personal fortunes or agendas than about the long-term success of the country.
I don't think this bodes well for the future.
Man, if you think that Americans believe in weird stuff, you should spend some time looking around modern Chinese culture. Rhino Horns? Vaguely phallic quasi edible marine life? Lucky numbers?
We're just posers.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!