Footage of Chang'e-6's land on far side of the moon | Hacker News Reader

Footage of Chang'e-6's land on far side of the moon

cnsa.gov.cn

112 pointsxnhbx80 comments

Super cool! We have been tracking this mission in Orbital Index for a while. https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2024-03-13-Issue-260/#chang...

This mission required a communication satellite that loiters on the far side of the Moon as well to relay communications back to earth. https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2024-03-13-Issue-260/#queqi...

Love Orbital Index... just realized I stopped getting emails from you guys in 2022 :( Does it auto-unsubscribe if I don't open one for a while? I was away from the Internet for a few months.

Glad you’re a fan! It shouldn’t, unless it was 6+ months I think.

Nice work, go team human! From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang'e_6

"If the mission is successful, China will become the first nation to land, collect, and deliver samples back to Earth from the far side of the Moon."

Your second sentence (even of it's a citation) makes this about competition, kinda negating the message of your first sentence.

competition within teams can be a good thing

I don't think anyone is really competing for this achievement right now. If I'm running a race with no other competitors, can I claim to have finished first? Or even to be racing?

In the past year there were 6 probes (include Chang'e-6) trying to make a soft landing on the moon and only half of them succeed or partially succeed. I'm not sure how it counts as "no other competitors".

The video element didn't work for me on iOS Safari for some reason. Anyway here's the direct link to the video: https://www.sastind.gov.cn/video/0602ce6dl2.mp4

So cool! At 0:28, you can briefly see the shadow of one of the landers legs about to touchdown

If anyone’s interested, I did a deep dive into the Chang’e 6 mission, including clarifying some misconceptions: https://jatan.space/moon-monday-issue-174/

Thanks, this is the most informative writeup I’ve read about the current and upcoming missions.

Thank you! It’s part of the Chinese lunar special series I’ve been doing all month. Here’s the rest of the four:

https://jatan.space/moon-monday-issue-175/

https://jatan.space/moon-monday-issue-176/

https://jatan.space/moon-monday-issue-177/

Amazing work Chang'e-6 team, amazing work China! Congratulations!

Great work, I'm curious as to how autonomous the landing was (I assume fully autonomous) - but since there's awesome video sent back from the dark side of the moon there must be some relay in orbit too.

I'd give the Chinese space program more than a healthy 50/50 chance of landing humans on the moon again within the next ten years.

I consider this unlikely - it is at least an order of magnitude harder to land people there and get them back even if you already have the heavy rockets and experience required. The US remains the only country capable of repeating this feat within the next 10 years, in spite of the current timelines being ridiculously unrealistic, simply because it doesn’t have to guess quite as much and either already has or in the advanced stages of building the necessary technological base.

I’m not convinced even the US is actually capable of that.

It’s the only country that landed people on the moon like twice a year. Sure, that was 50 years ago, but some of those old timers are still around.

> not convinced even the US is actually capable of that

Then you haven’t been paying attention to American aerospace over the past decade and a half. It is far more capable today than it was in the 60s, particularly in robotics.

Where we lag is in human space flight, in part due to bureaucracy and complacence among the majors, in part because we have ridiculously-high safety standards.

Incapability due to regulatory and bureaucratic burden is real incapability.

and frankly, while we have made some technical advances, we have also suffered severe logistical, political, and capital losses, especially in context of the aforementioned bureaucratic and regulatory burden. We have also suffered, IMO, loss of capability in our elite engineering echelon.

The F-35 is a perfect example of what I’m describing. Technically brilliant in some ways, sure. Pretty lame and terrible in others. Debatably an advance over previous generations of aircraft, at the very least.

Today’s NASA is a completely different animal than the NASA which put a man on the Moon.

I don’t see SpaceX doing it either. Not today. Maybe tomorrow. Let’s wait and see.

I don't believe current day USA will be able to go back to the moon. The decadence and corruption are accelerating.

Corruption merely makes things much more expensive. That is not really a concern to a country that can issue $3T in debt every year. Nor is “decadence”: within a decade SpaceX could do it on its own, without NASA.

While I agree with the second point, let's be honest: SpaceX has had a lot of help from NASA.

Are you sure it’s not the other way around at this point? NASA is really struggling at the moment.

Is it? Nevertheless, it doesn't matter, what matters is that they are cooperating. Which is good, don't get me wrong.

And then you remember the Wolf Amendment that was enacted to hold back Chinese space efforts and you laugh . According to this American law ,NASA is not supposed to be in contact with the Chinese government or Chinese government affiliated organizations.

It was just to delay missile development as Chinese affaires were caught gathering information for non-scientific endeavors, anyone with half of a brain knows that China was going to do this eventually.

Translations matter. There’s rather an important semantic distinction between claiming a ‘landing’ on the moon vs claiming ‘land’ on the moon.

Currently the headline on HN reads “Footage of Chang'e-6's land on far side of the moon”

Looks like a bad translation, it's not even proper English.

NHK reports[1] that China announced Chang'e-6 "landed" (着陸, chakuriku) successfully on the far side of the Moon.

[1]: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20240602/k10014468871000.ht...

It starts looking like a fractal halfway through.

You can't really tell the scale of the craters because each time you get closer, more craters appear. I can imagine that even with stereoscopic eyes, a human could easily misjudge distance and scale too. We're not used to operating in such a barren environment.

Is the footage fast-forwarded? I'd imagine landing to be much slower.

Also, is that how the moon looks, or is this some kind of night vision?

Definitely. You can see the lander "breaking" to adjust fall trajectory twice, the actual burst wouldn't be that fast.

camera footage taken in space is something weird indeed. I remember when i first saw how an eclipse affects shadows in real life. It immediately clicked in my brain why that early moon landing footage looked how it did. And also how easily so many people thought it was fake

Can you elaborate?

Shadows become incredibly sharp for instance, causing everything to look like it's rasterized in software!

It looks exactly like on the first Apollo photographs. Guess they must’ve hired Kubrick's students. Jokes aside, there’s just one light source on the moon, and no atmosphere to provide diffuse light. The dynamic range (contrast) of the moon is something we don’t see often on Earth.

And the lighting makes it really hard for the camera to see any stars, so the sky always looks deep black and fake which also adds to all those frustrating conspiracy theories.

The "video" is not actually a video. It is composed by a series of images. So yes the video is fast-forwarded.

And the probe will hover above the landing area and use a laser to detect the surface to choose the landing point. It can be seen in the video.

true, but aren't all videos just individual frames played in a sequential order?

Yes, you are correct. Sorry for misleading about that.

I saw some comments that due to the limited bandwidth of the relay satellite, these images were taken every second. So it is actually not a "video".

technically, it is a "video" at 1fps

Exactly. A very under-cranked video.

"Timelapse video" is the usual term for such videos.

At 0:28 you can see a brief glimpse of part of Chang'e-6 itself.

I can't tell if that's part of the ship, or its shadow: https://i.imgur.com/NTiZuJe.png

Good stuff. Very consistent program to moon they have there.

It is truly amazing how much engineering and science China has mastered.

They have the newest space station as well.

They appear to have made faster progress on production of more advanced computer chips as well but that requires some further investigation / proof.

This all while a single hostile nation wants to dictate what China is allowed or not allowed to buy on the free market.

It’s also fueled by rampant IP theft. It’s a lot easier to advance when you’re not actually inventing anything.

Be that as it may, these things are won by whoever crosses the finish line first and China appears to be ahead of the west at this point and especially if current trends continue.

Also worth noting that American space exploration achievements were also kickstarted by importing the talent from post-WW2 Germany.

"the talent from post-WW2 Germany" is that a new way of saying "Nazi war criminals" like von Braun?

There aren't significant differences between a V-2, AIM-120 AMRAAM, Minuteman, Patriot, Tomahawk, Saturn V, Delta IV, Falcon 9, et al..

They are all metal pipes filled with boom powder that can be used to throw things up.

And a microchip is just a bunch of copper wires with sand around them

One of the differences is that the V-2 was built via slave labor in a massive cave where people were literally worked to death.

"There aren't significant differences between a V-2, AIM-120 AMRAAM, Minuteman, Patriot, Tomahawk, Saturn V, Delta IV, Falcon 9, et al.."

I didn't think news.ycombinator.com catered to misinformation. I'm guessing your PhD is in Aerospace Engineering?

They are all pointy metal tubes with wings and (an) engine(s), filled with fuel that go boom to make them fly, carrying some sort of payload.

Their only difference is to what purpose they are used. Some are used to destroy, some are used to kill, some are used to defend, some are used to throw stuff into space.

But they are all pointy metal tubes filled with boom powder.

Absolutely insane comment and can't believe this is allowed here.

Nearly all modern forms of rocketry trace their roots to German technologies like the V-2, and rockets used for space exploration in particular are direct or spiritual descendents of intercontinental ballistic missiles repurposed for civilian use.

There really is no difference to the rockets themselves, they are all varying forms of pointy metal pipes filled with boom powder. The only difference is the payload they carry; whether they are humans or spaceborne vessels like satellites, or explosives of various descriptions with which to destroy and kill.

If you disagree, and you've certainly made it clear you do, you can put forth counterarguments instead of claiming quackery.

Well, you've almost convinced me.

One quick question though, what was the "powder" used on, say, the Apollo missions?

I've always heard the Saturn V launch had a J-2 liquid propellant rocket engine that used used liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.

Obviously I'm saying "boom powder" as a generic and funny term for the various fuels used in rocketry. They can be liquids (RP-1, liquid hydrogen, liquid methane, various hypergolics like UDMH, etc.) or solids (eg: solid rocket boosters, most military missiles and rockets).

The Saturn V used RP-1 and liquid oxygen for the first stage, and liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for the second and third stages. The Apollo CSM used dinitrogen tetroxide and "Aerozine 50", a 50:50 mix of hydrazine and UDMH hypergolic fuels that was originally used for the Titan II ICBM.