Chinese Spacecraft Nears Landing on Far Side of Moon
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
As discussed previously on HN, this was not an accident, but a planned deorbiting of an obsolete testbed. The loss of comms was not intended, but it happened three years after the last mission there and two years after the designed lifespan of the station.
A lot of it reeks of jealousy. I can very much understand not liking China's government, but a lot of great things are being done by Chinese people.
I mean, a random Hacker News poster seems to have figured it out easily enough!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-sp...
Edit: OP article has also updated to reflect the successful landing
That's a bit of a stretch. Landing on the moon is incredible and a huge congrats to everyone involved, but nobody "dared not try" to land on one side over the other. There just wasn't any particular need to do it.
NASA was busy "daring" to land on Mars. The ESA "dared" to land on Titan. And Russia, well, they're keeping the ISS alive right now so I won't criticize their achievements.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0283775
Edit: Jump to the 16:50 mark here: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xsyzwn
Imagine sending a probe to another planet, land successfully, and survive the hostile environment (for a little while anyway), only to have the issues with the lens cap. Again, and again, and again, and again.
A more recent failure has been on Curiosity. While it's been hailed a great success, it's had some major issues fulfilling with what was one if it's primary objectives - drilling into surface level targets and starting to measure things from the inside. It became inoperable after a few superficial utilizations. The most likely culprit? A piece of debris got caught in a drill feed mechanism. It could've been fixed by a man on the ground in a matter of minutes, but there is no man on the ground of course. NASA did manage to get a 2 inch drill without the stabilizers in the mid part of last year [1], thought there have been no updates since.
In many ways this is why I think people tend to rather overestimate the value of probes and remote robotics in general. Robotics, even to do relatively simple things, is incredibly hard. Trying to do not so simple things on planets tens to hundreds of millions of miles away in conditions unlike anything you can perfectly replicate on Earth? Well, you better send a few copies and just hope that what goes wrong on one probe/lander/etc (because something will go wrong) works out on one of the others!
[1] - https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/06/05/scientists-resume-use-...
The Soviets did an admirable job in even succeeded sending one of those photos back.
But to be fair to the Russians, the cameras weren't an important part of the mission (except for showing off), and getting rid of the caps at 700K temperature, 92bar pressure and sulfuric acid rain, while still preserving the cameras in working condition, is probably very difficult.
A chronology of that audio is:
---------
00:33 - Landing
00:41 - Camera lens cap being ejected off
01:00 - 02:09 - Drilling
02:14 - The drill system had a special series of tubes that used Venus' surface pressure to operate the mechanism for retrieving the soil sample, this is the seals being popped off to allow the pressure to rush in.
02:42 - Soil being injected into chamber
---------
Just unbelievable to understand that you're listening to the sounds of Venus from the surface of Venus. For anybody who'd like to know the location that's at 13.25°S 310°E on a basaltic plain near Phoebe Regio. That lander lasted for 57 minutes in temperatures of 869F with a pressure of 94 Earth atmospheres. The most remarkable thing to consider is that this all happened in 1981. Now 38 years ago. It's such a shame that the space race ended. There's no reason at all to think we wouldn't have been on Mars many years ago had it persisted.
I think the new head of NASA is much more ambitious and seems genuinely enthusiastically interested in making space exploration work. There was a nice writeup on 'We're not going to [just] do flags and footprints again.' here [1]. The great thing is that even outside of NASA, the future of space looks brighter than ever before at least. In a way we're in our own 1962, which was when JFK gave his 'We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.' to the moon speech.
[1] - https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/organizations/nasa/nasa-a...
Very cool. However, I kinda understand why most landers don't record audio: they seem very focused on achieving scientific objectives and those aren't really advanced by recording manmade sounds.
https://www.universetoday.com/36684/landings-on-venus/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_and_exploration...
TL;DR: Marg bar in Iranian political culture has been for nearly a century the equivalent of saying "damn" in English. In English saying "damn Iran" doesn't literally mean you wish Iran or Iranians to burn in eternal hellfire, although it would have once upon a time. Rick Steves has an anecdote where, amidst traffic in sweltering Tehran, his translator translated their driver's exasperated exclamation as "death to traffic", causing a lightbulb to go off in Steves' head. (https://blog.ricksteves.com/blog/death-to-israel-death-to-tr...)
Although, at this point I think Iranian political leaders purposefully make use of this mistranslation to antagonize Americans without appearing antagonistic to Iranians. Likewise when the Iranian President stated that Israel needed to be wiped off the map--AFAIU he purposefully made use of a sort of double entendre which could be taken literally or figuratively, appeasing both liberal and conservative Iranian factions.
I don't believe it's a common thinking among Chinese people, but rather NYT carefully picked this particular quote from like a million opinions by the chinese.
"Zhu Menghua, a professor at the Macau University of Science and Technology who has worked closely with China’s space administration. “We Chinese people have done something that the Americans have not dared try.” "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars
But just like you the adult in me wins for me too :)
Go with your instincts, international pissing contests are the best way to get resources devoted to space exploration.
What I'm getting at here is that I think your instincts would be the way to go. China's goals here are not to advance society, but to advance China. And about the time they start achieving things that parallel, let alone overcome, US achievements in space - expect to see the US budget for space development/exploration/colonization end up getting bumped up by a magnitude or two simply because if we don't then we risk falling behind them.
LOL what???
One of the mission goals here is to test for radio "silence" in the region.
"Though the moon is hardly untrodden ground after decades of exploration, a new landing is far more than just a propaganda coup, experts say.
The crater where the Chinese landed is the oldest and deepest on the moon, so the probe’s discoveries may offer insights into the moon’s origins and evolution. And some scientists suspect that the surrounding basin may be rich in minerals. If exploiting the moon’s resources is the next step in space development, a successful mission could leave the Chinese better positioned."