How did China know how to make their rover without sending a bunch of probes onto Mars? Did NASA share its data and info with China so that they knew what specs to make the solar panels, etc?
But knowing these are not enough for you to build and operate a fully successful mission. Even if you had the entire CAD file of a NASA lander and rover, you don't know why they are designed that way, you will not operate, use and troubleshoot issues correctly. You need to build the system from ground up, so the people on your teams have full understanding of every single "why" and "how". Only then will you have full control and ensure the mission is success.
I am sure you had experience taking ownership to a software project written by others. You always have go to the original designer to ask "why" and "how". The knowledge transfer often last months and countless meetings. If you don't fully understand, you can't fix issues or build new features. Most people would rather build their own then to fix something they don't fully understand.
For CNSA, they can access public available data. Then they have to simulate, wind tunnel tests, how to land, what shape of lander they need, how to balance and control the lander etc. They need to build up their understanding of the entire system. They actually has been improving their technology and understanding of atmospheric and controlled powered landing from earth and moon missions. One of things they did differently is adding a flap to the lander to stabilize it in flight, they said it was to increase the lander's robustness when encountering more extreme weather.
For solar panels, knowing the distance to the sun, the atmospheric density, pressure, composition, force of gravity on mars, you can estimate the theoretical max of the solar energy available per unit of area. Then you could say assume only 30% is available due to weather. I am sure they have more advanced ways to estimate. Interesting fact about the rover, it has a solar heat capture and retention system. And they use the heat for thermo-control at night instead of electricity captured from solar panels, saving electricity use.
For where to land, topology and maps of mars is in public domain. You can find a general region where to land but these data are not detailed enough to actually land. And mars surface could have changed since these were captured. So tianwen-1 contains a orbiter and the lander. The orbiter has instruments such has high resolution imaging. They arrived mars orbit in February, and the 3 months since the orbiter was collecting data on mars. From these data they finalized their landing plans.
This is China's first spacecraft to ever travel this far. They also don't have communication network between mars and earth. So Tianwen-1's orbiter is also a communication satellite.
The impressive thing is the engineering side, how they engineered the system that each component all worked correctly in one go. The rocket: the rocket required to launch tianwen-1 (weighs 5 tons) to mars orbit was only tested successfully in dec 2019. China also doesn't have earth mars communication satellites and fully operational deep space communication system before this mission. This the first time all these system are tested live. To fly a spacecraft to mars for the first time, have it being captured by mars, and orbit mars correctly. Take data on mars. Release the lander. The lander going through atmosphere, releasing parachute at super sonic speeds, the lander detaches from parachute and uses a rocket engine to fly. At height of 100m, optical imaging and laser maps out the ground and autonomously navigate the craft to soft land on flat ground. Orbiter forms communication link between mars rover and earth. Mars rover collects sun light, drives, survives the elements of mars (so far).
Overall, they are standing on the shoulders of people who went before them. One shouldn't look down on their success, nor should they over-hype their success.
CNSA said Zhurong landed 3km away from their designed coordinate. For the first 42 mars days, zhurong traveled 236m.
Also this is the reason this mission is considered to be a great success, it shows their ability to landing on a totally unknown planet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Prog...
Once you've got that down pat, it's not that different to land one on Mars, especially since the Chinese rover was small enough not to require the elaborate skyhook approach.
Also, NASA is legally prohibited from cooperating with China on anything space-related.
The equipment would need to be rated differently. How the signal is sent from the rover to the orbiter would be different, etc. There’s a lot of knowledge that you would need to build up about Mars and having probes on Mars and the logistics of sending data to and from Earth via orbiter that you would need before jumping all the way to sending a large expensive rover to Mars.
That’s interesting about NASA not being allowed to share data. I really wonder how China was able to leap to sending a rover without lots of investment in understanding everything else about it.
The logistics of sending data back can be reasonably considered to be a challenge that could be solved on the first try. The first space probe that NASA managed to actually get to Mars (Mariner) worked. The first landers that NASA managed to get to Mars (Viking) worked.
Continent-wide public education churning out legions after legions of STEM graduates?
What you really mean is “the richest/privileged move to US and Europe”
Both have strength and weakness. Low entropy societies are more efficient, extremely good at building physical things. But tend to have less varieties. High societies are more chaotic, but also more innovative, more productive in spiritual domain. Not only in technologies but also arts ,etc.
It would be ideal that both societies can cooperate and share the benefits leveraging advantages of both worlds. But in reality it's quite complex and not going to a good direction in short term
So I don't really see it. I don't think Western societies are necessarily always going to be better at technology and I think you really, really underestimate the chaos and varieties of many non-Western societies. In many ways the West is quite low-entropy.
SMDH
Can you elaborate on this?
Lots of questions just about their solar panels and what would be the most effective chemicals to make their solar panels out of to maximize their output.
They have no probes previously on the surface of Mars. How would they know how to make their solar panels to be the most efficient without data? Did they just guess? Did NASA share that information? Or is that secret information that NASA kept quiet and Chinese spies stole that information?
All three possibilities could have occurred but I really doubt that China would just guess and then spend billions of dollars to send a probe without knowing if it would work.
And people had a fairly good idea before going there, obviously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars#History_of_...
My point is China has no probes on Mars unless they have secret ones. They can GUESS what would be best optional frequencies to tune their solar panels for but my point is that they are spending billions of dollars. Do they really want to rely on data they didn’t retrieve themselves? That seems like an odd thing to take a risk on. Better to either work together with nasa since they have the expertise. Hence I’m curious what the relationship is between China and nasa for this project and if it was an open one or if they got the data some other way.
Your statement is nonsense.
Why would they need probes? The Mars atmospheric composition isn't exactly classified information, they know it's a solid surface. The rest is just math and some very complex engineering.