Hacker News Reader

Comment by Clewza313 | Hacker News Reader

China has been sending probes to the Moon since 2007:

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.

View on HN

Of course it’s different. You need to know how to make solar panels so that it will work on Mars. It’s different than those you would need for the moon. It would have to work through the dust storms.

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.

Many of the design outputs of the NASA rover programs are public domain. For example, the peak solar panel rating of the MER (Opportunity and Spirit) is published, the size of the panels are known (or can easily by estimated), the power needed to drive the rovers around is published, the weight of the rover is published, the size of wheels can be easily estimated (or is published).

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.

> I really wonder how China was able to leap to sending a rover without lots of investment in understanding everything else about it.

Continent-wide public education churning out legions after legions of STEM graduates?

The best of which promptly move to US and Europe.

I think you severely underestimate the quantity of top scoring STEM graduates.

What you really mean is “the richest/privileged move to US and Europe”

The proportion of Chinese stem graduates who aren’t simply copying their way around and are gifted enough to run these programs is likely about the same as the proportion anywhere else. Chinese people are no more or less intelligent than anyone else.

In my country, and I guess otherd in western Europe, we often fail to appreciate the sheer power of those "other" countries such as Russia or China. Many are still stuck in the colonialist vision of things where Europe and US were vastly superior. This is not true anymore. And as you point out, intelligence is uniformly distributed.

Days when Russia could send problems to Mars are long over, so with regards to Russia reality ironically corrected itself to match the US expectations.

Well, I must admit picking Russia was a bit far fetched :-) However, I have the feeling Russia is still a strong player on the geopolitical level (see Syria, Ukraine -- although I'm sure civilian casualties say otherwise).

Not supporting OPs assertion, but. Even with same proportion they will have huge advantage in absolute nos. Also society and government are lot different, changing the way and proportion of people persevere for a particular career option.

let's put ideology aside. It's quite interesting to watch different societies, governance, cultures evolving, cooperating,competing among each other. Eastern world is more likely have low entropy societies while Western have high entropy societies.

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

This seems like a "just so" statement. Fifty years ago people would say that Western societies are more efficient and better at building physical things.

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.

Shocking that you have to state this fact. Is this HN or YouTube?

SMDH

On HN it seems like there is a huge anti-US/sinophile presence which seeks to elevate any achievement, no matter how minor or retread, as if it were some major accomplishment done in spite of insurmountable purposeful opposition by the evil colonial empire building westerners. When even the slightest accomplishment is so outlandishly propagandized it becomes hard to view actual ones in their proper light. Especially when it’s unclear whether they’re “standing on shoulders” or simply trying to pass the shoulders off as their own.

Don't make the mistake thinking that this happened without "lots of investment". The Chinese space program is massive and has been running for decades.

> You need to know how to make solar panels so that it will work on Mars. It’s different than those you would need for the moon.

Can you elaborate on this?

Does the Martian atmosphere filter out certain frequencies of light? And how does it compare against the frequencies that their rover solar panel is sensitive to? Or is their atmosphere thin enough such that UV light gets through? Can they make use of that?

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.

To be clear, the composition of the Martian atmosphere is not a secret.

And people had a fairly good idea before going there, obviously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars#History_of_...

Composition of the atmosphere and knowing what frequencies of light make it all the way to the ground is different. There’s so much dust in the air that it might reflect different frequencies depending on where you are. That’s why having a cheaper probe on the ground that measures this makes it a better chance of getting it right for more expensive probes. But they don’t have those initial probes.

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.

It’s completely different. Let’s start with the moon has no atmosphere so you do not use parachutes to land on the moon like you do on Mars.

Your statement is nonsense.

Of course it's different, but you're still sending a probe to a celestial body, so things like building the rocket, designing radiation-hardened hardware, space communications, launching on a desired trajectory, automated landing with retro-propulsion etc are all similar and needed for both. Basically, if you're going to practice the Moon is the place to do it, and that's why the US, Soviet, Chinese and now Indian space programs are all following the same basic game plan.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com