China lands rover on Mars

The absurdity of the "it's stealing" position is obvious when you imagine what the world would look like if everybody suddenly decided each country is doing only their own research and is not allowed to use any external idea. It would be utterly ridiculous. Copying-and-improving is the default, it's what makes us move forward as humanity. Everything else is just politics and national pride.

> Crying "No fair! You stole it!" sounds more like a petulant child than anything else.

It's also exactly what made nasa in the first place, with America stealing much of rocket science from the Germans in the wake of WW2.

Precisely. Instead of crying the same people should question their Government on why the tech wasn't protected enough if it was not supposed to be copied.

Not directly relevant to this case, since I don't know anything about these Mars rovers than the superficial stuff from news outlets, but I think that what hurts isn't the copying, but boasting about it, presenting it as your own, not acknowledging the source, etc.

A trivial example: a nephew of mine proudly showed his drawings. They were really fantastic for his age, and everyone told him so. Turns out, he drew them by putting paper on a computer monitor (this was back when CRTs were still the fashion) and tracing. That did change the perception of merit a bit. The difference in the difficulty underlies the difference in appreciation.

To make my stance entirely clear: this is not meant to condone or condemn either side.

Is there any evidence that there's copying going on? I tried searching online, but couldn't find any. A few months ago I saw people claiming that the leading choice in the contest to name the rover was "Perseverance"[1], which wasn't actually true (see the comment about how 弘毅 is translated). There seems to be a lot of misinformation out there these days.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/konwyz/starship_sta...

In a sense, it's good competition makes for a good game and achieving greater goals.

e.g. Soviet Union vs United States.

I like it, I welcome it - it begs to open the purse and spend and brings the most creative solutions to the table.

Like computers, boy what a fad!

> It seems pretty silly to get all up in arms about copying other peoples' stuff.

Wasn't it an American who said "good artists copy, great artists steal"?

> Copy what works and innovate on top of it

I think the main gripe with China's process is that they don't do the latter. They produce replica's then herald them as original works of the mightiest country on the planet. Everyone everywhere steals, but China does it with a little more 'F-U' than most countries, and tend to use what they steal to oppress.

I spent a few years working for a defense contractor out of college, and Chinese IPs were probing every internet facing server we had 24/7.

https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-tactical/chinese-knock...

https://futurism.com/the-byte/china-is-working-on-what-looks...

> Industrial Espionage.... > Crying "No fair! You stole it!" sounds more like a petulant child than anything else.

Pointing it out as a matter of economic and national security is far from a childish thing to do. If you're government is willing to subjugate people into slave labor at a massive scale while at the same time stealing the IP born from fairer societies, that creates an uneven competitive landscape, which ultimately works against the fairer societies. Think of it this way: Safety nets cost money, but the return you get is smarter people taking bigger risks and creating new useful things. If you get all the benefits of that (IP) and don't have to pay, you will win, and create a crappier world in the process. I'd liken it to brain drain. You spend all this money educating people only to have the return on that investment go elsewhere.

I know the immediate response to this is going to be "But America did such and such...". I don't care what America did. When someone is on trial for stealing a car, talking about how someone else stole a bike isn't a defense.

The problem is IP theft hurts novel research, since illegal knock-off makers don't have to recoup their R&D investments.

The fact your comment is upvoted says all you need to know about the parcipatants in this thread.

China merely isn't just engaged in industrial espionage because it works to not duplicate effort. They steal to undermine the effort of the people that made it possible to begin with. In many cases ruining the companies that made the original innovation. This isnt crying and whinging for no reason it's unethical and wrong. This isnt a two way street where chinese innovations are helping our world. Almost everything the Chinese steal all while burning through natural resources and at alarming pace and injecting the most harmful substances into the environment. And be honest they are simply doing this to saberrattle the US and create propoganda to legitmaze an oppressive state. So, yes it's not only unfair, it's evil. And I'm not happy for China.

I would be impressed if they take the initiative and do it.

And of course USA had considerable influx of German manpower and know-how some of it very directly went into their space program.

In its own right I find it a fairly major technical achievement that the first and only orbital flight of buran was unmanned, landing on a runway with no human at the controls. That's one thing the US never did with the shuttle.

The stone cold fact is that China has n-times engineers than USA, mostly working for the same American companies who outsourced their RnD, and engineering decades ago, and working on mostly the same things.

It strikes me every time hearing such argument from people completely oblivious to the above fact.

Buran made an orbital flight. I think the reason of the project's failure was lack of funding, not technology in that case.

Oh, interesting, I thought it would use inflatable balloons for the touchdown.

When the Voyager missions were launched most of the world didn't have international calling. So making a call from lets say Somalia to the US, involved finding a post office with the only international line in town and "booking" a call. Which meant you had to walk over and write down your name (and if you were lucky enough to have a local landline your 4 digit phone number) in a ledger and then walk back home to sit by the phone, for two days to a week, before the operator would call up to tell you the line was available. If the exchange wasn't sophisticated enough to forward the call, you then had to drop everything you were doing and walk back to the post office to use the line. Now think about how anything worked with that level of latency :)

The development cycles in space exploration are heroic. My own code takes literally one minute to run and the wait is a serious drag on my productivity.

On the code side of these rover and landers, you also have to deal with radiation/vacuum-hardened chips.

From the little I understand, these chips behave a quite a bit different than the types of stuff we work with. For one, you have to assume that your programs will be corrupted via cosmic rays causing bit-flips. Chips are slower and more rigorous as a result.

This being HN, there may be a person on here that can speak more to program design with space rated hardware. I'd love to learn a bit more!

It has a ground penetrating radar to see stuff 100 m below the ground, something that no other Mars rover has done before. I think that's pretty cool!

It had some coverage here, it was one of the three probes headed for Mars this year, other two being the US and UAE probes.

The rover itself is not as larges as the Perseverance or Curiosity, but their orbiter seems a quite heavy probe. Hope we will get some detailed high-resolution images of the surface from the orbiter, so that we can have even better surface maps of Mars.

Also the CNSA programs don't get as much coverage in the West. Their Chang'e 5 lunar sample return probe was quite a good achievement, with they being able to do an autonomous docking in lunar orbit.

A video of the sample transfer in lunar orbit: https://youtu.be/iABFC9V3cPc

I am usually up to date on these sorts of things and this is the first I have heard of it.

That said, absolutely amazing to see happen! Here is hoping that it lasts long past the design date like the others tend to do.

SPAAS - Space Platforms As A Service

There's a number of private moon landers under development.

Rocketlab is heading down that track already with their Photon satellite platform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAUj-TQpn-A

This is already common in the satellite world. Companies design & build satellite platforms (usually called "buses" for sats) that satellite developers build on top of. Usually provides the core physical structure, plus attachments for payloads or sensors; some more advanced ones also include stuff like avionics, power distribution etc. Wikipedia has some interesting examples [0].

Photon mentioned in a sibling comment builds on that idea by providing a bus with engines to make it into a simple spacecraft. I don't know of any off-the-shelf rover platforms yet but can absolutely see the same thing happening when there's enough demand / cost of access to places worth roving around is cheaper.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_bus

> The CNSA is severely underfunded in recent years

Source?

> If the operation failed, they'd probably postpone the whole announcement till a more "proper" time, since nobody even know they tried to land the rover.

What? Here’s CNSA’s official Weibo account announcing yesterday that the rover will land in Utopia Planitia between May 15 and May 19, depending on local landing conditions.[1] A brief Google News search turned up reports from before the landing, e.g. [2] quoting a speech delivered on the 13th by a Chinese Academy of Sciences professor at Beijing Institute of Technology mentioning that the rover will land on the 15th.

[1] https://m.weibo.cn/7480894382/4636823021945182

[2] https://ezone.ulifestyle.com.hk/article/2957353/中國祝融號火星車將於本周...

Edit: And here’s People’s Daily posting the same CNSA announcement yesterday: https://m.weibo.cn/2803301701/4636812058297556 A search of “天问” there turns up regular updates too, pretty conclusively debunking the “nobody even know” claim.

Given that your first piece of evidence isn’t sourced (yet) and I can’t find anything on it (maybe the space tech graduates flocking to IT part is true, but few sectors pay better to begin with, so that’s not a good indication of underfunding; it’s not like NASA pays anywhere close to FAANG), your second piece of evidence is easy to check and doesn’t stand, and your third piece of evidence is circumferential and akin to Kremlinology, it’s hard to take your conclusions seriously.

> 1. The CNSA is severely underfunded in recent years, to the extent that a considerable amount of space tech graduates went directly into other more "lucrative" fields such as the IT industry.

To be fair, NASA has the same problem. Rocket science just doesn’t pay as well as a FAANG programming job, even if you are trained up for the former. At lot of fields that traditionally attracted smart people are suffering similar issues.

Sorry but I don't think you do respect "the engineers and scientists who made the marvel achievement" if the only thing that you are able to get out of this is as a publicity stunt to please the CCP.

It is not an understatement for me to say that I abhor the US empire as a whole and their destructive effects on the sovereignty of the larger world. However, when I'm reading about a NASA project, I don't have the knee jerk reaction of "it's American! BAD!!!" That's because while there is some political gain to be had from the prestige of a space agency, there is very little direct economic or military advantage and the main purpose is scientific enrichment which has been beneficial for humanity as a whole, not just the US. NASA astronauts, scientists, and engineers may have their own nationalistic biases but I don't doubt that their primary motivation is a love for space sciences and they tend to have a more cosmopolitian view of humanity's future anyway. The same was true of the Russians and the Chinese who worked in this sector.

Now, there could be case to be made that the CCP could decide to hoard the scientific data for themselves and refuse to share it to the wider public but until I see this in action, I will remain cautiously optimistic. Roscosmos (formerly CCCP) were able to collaborate with NASA despite their host nations being mortal enemies on the wider world stage so I don't see why the CCP would risk hampering their progress by becoming isolationist when it comes to space research

Furthermore, this is a monumental achievement considering this is the first successful non US landing on Mars and was achieved on their first try! the countries are able to send probes there, the more data we can gather and that's always a net good.

Now if only the Russians could manage to dissolve the curse they seem to have when it comes to Mars rover missions, then we could have a seriously potent race.

Chinese here. hmm, last year when tianwen-1 was launched they said they will land sometime in the first quarter of 2021. They didn't announce a specific date because this is the first time we sent a probe to mars and they need to gather detailed data of mars to ensure a good landing. For example, high definition scan of the landing area and weather patterns. There are many systems in production use for the first time. For example, deep space communication (we never sent a probe this far). Or mars geo-positioning system (How does the probe know where its located in space with relation to mar's surface, how does it know when and where to release the lander to ensure it lands on the target). I am sure they need to gather data and validate these systems. This usually is a full mission itself. So I don't think its surprising that once all the research and validation is done can they announce a date for landing.

As for secrecy. I believe it comes mostly from CNSA's lack of confidence. This is the first time they ever sent something this far and they are attempt to land all in one go. Its daunting to think all the systems that have to work right on the first try. If I were them, I would be unconfident as well. I think they are trying to keep the expectation in check, not wanting to hype the thing. Give them the breathing room if they fail.

Yes, CNSA has strong political pressure to not fail. That's due to: 1) public support for the country continue to spend money on sending fireworks to the sky and 2) public confidence in country's system. But it doesn't mean failures are not tolerated. For example, the long march 5 rocket failed during development, and resulted in 3 year delay in the program and pushed back all the launch missions, like tianwen-1, chang'e5. change5 was supposed to launch in 2018, and it sat in the hanger for 2 years. The chang'e team didn't even know what to work on. But the rocket team got support. Learn from failures, troubleshoot, improve processes. I am sure if tianwen-1 failed, the team will get support. They will learn, and try again. I think the political pressure is not all terrible in healthy dose. It ensures people are working carefully, thinking fully, creating processes and methods, to ensure stuff gets done. Without political pressure, you will see more "corruption" and "bureaucracy".

Also think about what the news will be if china space missions did fail.

tianwen has been in the works for a decade now, they didn't start this recently and time it to ccp's 100th anniversary. The launch in 2020 was because the mars launch window. ccp is saying many years now that they support the space endeavor and what china to progress in science and tech. Support for CNSA only got stronger in recent years.

As for money. Pay is a issue in China for scientists and researchers in general. Especially, in all of the state-owned sectors and public institutions, not just space. Your front line workers will leave when pressure and money are not in balance. Until no one is there working for you. So at some point leaders will realize its not sustainable. And given the political goal of improving science, research and tech in china, pay is going to be a central problem needs to be tackled.

Lastly, I feel like regardless of politics, we should be proud of this moment. 2200 years after 屈原 stared at the stars and wrote the poem 问天，we built a spacecraft landed on another planet, bring Chinese characters to it for the first time in history. 遂古之初，谁传道之？上下未形，何由考之？Does it not have certain romance to it?

Space missions like to set easier to accomplish goals. Anything after that is viewed as a bonus. US space program did the same with the recent Mars mission.

Spirit and Opportunity both had 90-day official mission lengths as well and look how long they lasted. I think this is a simple case of underpromise and overdeliver.

Opportunity also has a 90 sols designed life. Designed, designed.

If you design something so that it has a 99% chance of lasting 90 days, there's a pretty good chance it'll last 6 months or even a year. Especially since failures tend to follow a bathtub curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

All things considered, 90 days is pretty good for how harsh of an environment Mars can be.

Also, there are dozens of ways to make the mission last longer but no ways of accomplishing that without adding more weight.

I've waited decades for this. Game on!

Yes because the lander will melt quickly.

The USSR did back in the day. It is much more harder, not to necessary land, but for your lander to survive more than a couple of hours.

It is hot like an oven, with 400F temperatures, and multiple ATM pressures. It is much a more challenging environment.

Not that I know of, Venus is kinda crazy. 90 ATM pressure, -1 pH acid rain, about 700 K temperatures at night, it's pretty absurd. Unless you want to make a probe out of solid Tungsten, you're probably out of luck. And good luck getting that out of low earth orbit, that would be stupidly heavy.

NASA has been soliciting lander designs[1], as well as coming up with their own[2].

[1] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasas-venus-rover-challenge...

[2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20190034042

See the Venera missions:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera

Apart from Venus which is quite interesting, indeed, but very challenging goal, I hope there will be better exploration of Mercury, since it's rich in iron and closest to the Sun. It is a perfect fit for systematic monitoring of Sun's activity. Moreover, such proximity would make the energy density a big advantage in terms of the mission lifetime.

planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-surface-ever

Russians landed 10 probes successfully and took pictures and did the science. Venera 13 lander survived for 127 minutes.

You can shield the probes from sulfuric acid and pressure, but it's hard to keep electronics cool for longer than few hours. Mean surface temperature is 464 °C. (867 °F). Doing science experiments is even harder.

I am very anti-CCP and try to be vocal about it (my sister no longer lives there).

However I don't mind that China copies stuff, my biggest issue is how asymmetric their commercial policies are. Actually, pretty much any policy they have is very anti non Han Chinese

If China had any flavour of democracy I'd be much more supportive, my views intersect with many different aspects of Chinese culture

I wish my country would adopt some of the successful policies China has, without the absolute disregard for personal freedom/rights

The parachute + inflatable bouncy ball landing vehicle worked for the spirit and opportunity rovers. I recall seeing something from NASA that the spirit size landing was about the maximum size that was viable for that. They were explaining why re using the same design for the new much larger RTG powered rovers would not be possible.

I think overall they got a greater mass into Mars orbit than Perseverance. They have bundled a rather large orbiter and the rover into a single mission, whereas Perseverance payload is entirely the surface rover and related modules.

I thought the primary benefit of the sky-crane method was avoiding kicking up high-velocity rocks and dust that could damage the lander, by direct impact or by falling, during the last moments of the landing? It might allow for more sensitive instruments and tools, with less protection on them.

For example the helicopter was slung underneath the latest NASA lander, and though it had a protective shell, you still don't want a rock to whack that

Arguably, though sky-crane is cool and clever, it isn't so much more complex than a system in which the rover must drive off a landing platform after it is safely down. That also has a lot of moving parts and opportunities for failure

But if a sky-crane lander lands successfully, at least you can be sure it isn't already covered in grit and dust

Its name is Zhurong (祝融), not Rongzhu.

At least JPL can certainly update the code in its rovers (at least the main programs, probably not various firmware).

I doubt they incorporated the knowledge of another rover in their code but I believe JPL rovers are “driven” by humans and do not explore autonomously. Due to the delay, the commands are slightly higher level (short term setpoints) but the point is that a human would have to command the rover to drive into another; it wouldn’t happen automatically.

> Are the landing sites even remotely close to each other?

The two rovers are 1873 km away from each other.

calculation and sources: https://gist.github.com/krisoft/4f06624a79f4a0df1107fb29be99...

Here is the footage we were able to recover from the incident https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIx0a1vcYPc "Sci-Fi Short Film “Wire Cutters" | DUST"

Yes the Chinese should have sent some people with cameras to get good video of the rover landing.

Consider that China is banned from the ISS and other kinds of space technology collaboration programs. China had to develop all space technology on their own. Some perspective on how significant.

Assuming the Zhurong Mars rover can be successfully released in the next few days, China will become the second country in the world with a working rover on Mars.

The significance is that that space travel is becoming a commodity. In the recent past we had several countries attempting moon landings. The Chinese landed successfully. The Israelis had a failed mission recently. The Indians crashed (on purpose) a probe on the moon. The Japanese, Iranians, and probably a few others have each launched satellites into orbit. It's getting crowded there.

The other significant thing is that there is now a bit more urgency to the matter of getting humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars. The Chinese are preparing to set up their own space station and are obviously interested in going to the moon and Mars and they seem to have the technical capability to get there. It's a bit like the early days of the space age when NASA and the Russians were competing for getting there first. NASA seems busy fighting domestic battles for funding rather than getting stuff done. They got a lucky break with SpaceX having a bit more focus on that front and proposing something that might actually fly. Now they need to get serious about actually making that happen. If they don't, somebody else will.

I think it’s very significant. Interplanetary navigation and retro propulsive soft landings are tricky to get right. Several recent lunar missions have failed and historically about half of missions to Mars crapped out. China is rapidly racking up a very solid track record with their lunar and now Mars landings. Also rovers are a significant step up in complexity and capability from static landers.

The Long March 8 architecture looks like it’s suitable for adaptation for first stage recovery, and they have expressed the intention to attempt it, so China are lining up to overtake Russia as the strongest competitor to the US in space technology.

When the entire world moved their factories there and then started to import everything, what else would you expect? It's funny how communists beat capitalists using greed to their advantage. Now it's a matter of time that communism will be seeping through every country fabric and it will be the end of the free world as we know it.

Which India probe was this? I don't remember any discussion or news about India landing a probe on the moon in the past 10 years.

It's the western media... They spent several hours talking about another rocket launched by SpaceX as if it was a big scientific advancement. But a major advancement by China is gonna be a little notice, or maybe they will say how this is a danger for everyone.

India and NASA went through concerted PR efforts in the lead up to the orbital insertion and landing respectively.

In this case it was known that the rover would be on Mars sometime in "mid-May" -- and now suddenly it's here. No globally oriented, in-the-moment PR. You can't fault anyone for it not being as immediately recognized and discussed as the other two.

Western media are more interested on China's failure than her success. Example : Recent hyping of Long March uncontrolled reentry.

SpaceX is no doubt cool. Nonetheless we're discussing China landing its first rover on a planet NASA's been flying a helicopter around for the last month. I mean, both are great accomplishments, but if you have to treat it as a competition and pick a winner...

Yes!! Moreover, China has optimized the process of massively scale production of everything. This is good as it decreases prices.

Seeing it as a global humanity achievement... this is great.

If the human race wants to have a future, we need to take care of the planet we live on, not assume we can slash-and-burn our way through new environments whenever we trash our home too badly.

I would definitely welcome Space race, take 2

That's funny. The thousand talents program is about attracting talents globally. Now who are you to say that those talents are 'yours' not 'theirs'? How about those talents the US attracted before because 'everyone likes the freedom here'? Are those not stolen simply because the US did it under a different political banner?

Put your statement in some minimal check. The IP theft you are referring are just random business patent whose sole purpose is to prevent market competition...

If you think a Mars Rover can be copied, well, you better copy one yourself...

Just remember, by your definition, the US "stole" textile technology from the UK. [1]

[1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-na...

If the thousand talents program means this achievement doesn't belong to them, then landing on the moon belongs to the Germans.

>IP theft

I hope that one day we look back on Imaginary Property and the silly notion that pure information is a scarce resource that can be owned, and realize what a terrible anti-humanist idea it is. It was a concept dreamt up by lawyers primarily for lawyers.

Funnily enough, Elon Musk agrees, at least with regard to Tesla imaginary property: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you I'd hope he has the same approach with SpaceX things, but I admit I haven't looked into it as of this comment.

Everyone stands in the shoulders of those who came before, and that is a good thing.

The US didn't invent physics, didn't invent gunpowder, oil, math, textiles, ROCKETS, etc. But they did "acquire" them all, somehow.

> China runs the largest IP theft program in the world.

Most IP has been given to them by "businessmen" trying to gain and edge and betting wrong. That is not theft, if anything, is stupidity. To the degree China has stolen trade secrets, do you really think no other country has a corporate spy program? Do you not know who the biggest ip "thief" in the world is?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161834. What an utterly wretched flamewar. I'd scold all of you individually, but it would be too much work.

Please read the site guidelines and take them in more deeply. There's a lot there:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You mean compared to the US to use the largest spy organisation in the world to spy on contracts, technology, business secrets, and personal information of business leaders of other nations to get an edge.

It always buffles me how Americans can complain about things that China does (in the business world) while being perfectly fine about what their own government does in the same space. Many actually actively promote it.

Same for China enable someone who is in charge of the mission to do whatever it is that person does...

Can we stop for a moment to label anything from China with political statement?...

Things are built by people, not some random business man...

Please don't take HN threads into tedious nationalistic flamewar. We're trying to avoid that here, along with other predictable+nasty discussion genres.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161906.

Don’t worry they announced on WeChat as well.

Kind of how NASA post stuff on WeChat even though most Americans don’t use it... wasn’t it also banned under trump?

Deepfakes have invalidated this statement

Wut? there's thing called telemetry observed by multiple receiving stations.