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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious about the use of a wireless camera to photograph the lander and the rover. It seems like extra weight and complexity for purely PR reasons.

Yes, you need to inspect each vehicle, but the rover can clearly examine the lander and move around it, while the lander needs only one camera, possibly an existing descent one, to inspect the rover.

Is Earth in an ideology war again?

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> It seems like extra weight and complexity for purely PR reasons.

And that's the thing that gets a public supportive of your space program and thus the resources keep flowing.

Drop the PR and you drop the funding.

This is a democratic model you are assuming, I don't think CCP needs the Chinese people to "support" anything they do, it really just boils down to whether the CCP leaders support it.

National pride is very important in either model.

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. Those lead to highly repetitive discussion, which is tedious and usually turns nasty — therefore not what we want here.

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

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Possibly a technology test? I don't think it's any more or less silly than a helicopter that also doesn't actually do any science other than testing out the concept for future missions.

> ...a helicopter that also doesn't actually do any science other than testing out the concept for future missions.

Isn't that scientific? Testing out the hypothesis of aerial maneuverability in Martian airpsace?

It's more so engineering than science. We were absolutely certain that it was possible for a long time.

That’s pretty close to the definition of science… form a hypothesis and test it then report your results. Not every test has to be microbiological or geological in origin to be considered “science”. They’re also getting to test the resiliency of consumer grade computers and electronics in the Martian atmosphere and probably many many other experimental ideas that aren’t public knowledge.

It may be scientifically worthless, but the public pays for these missions and the public likes pretty pictures. JunoCam on NASA's Jupiter orbiter, Juno, was added in order to give the public pretty pictures of Jupiter.[1] I personally think that's really cool.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JunoCam

Something could go wrong with any of those and cameras can be pretty light these days since we put them in doorbells, so I doubt they're sweating it when there are multiple potential benefits to having it there. :)

Curiosity weighed almost 2000 lbs, so it's not like rovers on Mars are afraid to weigh anything which is not to say they don't run the numbers.

These missions usually have scientific AND engineering objectives. Having a spare camera that the hover put anywhere may not be very valuable scientifically, but it validates the engineering of all communication, power and mechanical systems involved. That will allow more advanced scientific objectives in the future.

Space exploration is a prestige game among world powers since the very beginning. China needs good PR pictures to show they can do just as well as NASA. If we are lucky they will try to one up each other for decades to come.

Are people taking selfies in front of the Eiffel Tower involved in ideological war? Let scientists have a win without injecting politics.

It's useful for future historians. We're not just exploring space, we're leaving something behind for the future of humanity.

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