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Comment by beachwood23 | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who thinks that picture of the yellow spacecraft on "the moon" looks incredibly fake?

There is an explanation in this video.

Current renderings are based on real-time telemetry data being sent back from the probe.

40 years is a long time and instruments have advanced. I guess now that the solar panels are engaged and the rover is active, we will get some decent footage. The moon in 1080p? Yes please!

http://english.cntv.cn/program/newsupdate/20131214/104460.sh...

It will be good to see actual footage from the Moon. Forgive my skepticism, but after the Chinese team faked their summit of Everest I am naturally skeptical.

That sounds absurd. Do you know of any good articles? My initial searches only returned things like "Did the Chinese fake their summit???"

That's understandable. You know even the fact that America's moon-landing has been challenged for a long while. I was hoping China to land their rover to exactly where Armstrong landed on the Moon. Supposedly, the USA flag and the rover should be still there, which would make a conclusion and silence the debate.

Apollo 11 didn't bring a rover, and Buzz Aldrin reported that the flag was blown over by the takeoff of the ascent module. (the flag would still be there, just thrown on the ground.)

If you think that would end it then you don't know conspiracy theories. It would just be proof that China is in on it too.

No informed/intelligent individual would debate that the moon landing was faked. It's absolutely absurd to believe the tech was around to fake a landing, but not actually land on the moon. There's no point in trying to convince every single person we landed there.

Ah yes just as after that American Lance Armstrong was found guilty of doping all this time I am VERY rightfully sceptical of ALL American athletes from then on indeed.

For a second, I thought you're talking about THE Armstrong who landed on the Moon. I have to blame the context of the conversation here.

ah, yes... racism 101: the hive mind.

As you should be. Anyone still believing that doping is not a part of American sport is a fool.

Not just athletes. Astronauts too.

Astronauts are doping? Do you think they will have to hand back the Space-Cup?

1080p makes it somewhat harder to "photoshop" any accidental "boogieman" out, which may be the hardest technological challenge of a moon landing.

On a separate note, I was hoping the Chinese would install a big Bitcoin banner on the moon to further boost its adoption.

Yes, because transmitting 1080p over wireless connection on a power-constrained device 384,400km away is a good use of resources.

Ahh, amateur spacecraft design time.

In real-time perhaps not, but yapcguy didn't say that. You can bet they'll be recording major events in high resolution/framerate (deployment, first drive, etc) and transmitting them back later, if only for engineering purposes. Rad-hard nonvolatile memory is relatively cheap when you're sending probes to other planets — even old Spirit/Opportunity had 256 MB.

We also know the rover has some real-time transmission capability (at unspecified resolution):

>The rover will be capable of real time video transmission, while it will be able to dig and perform simple analysis of soil samples. For the real time video transmissions Yutu will use the PanCam. These cameras will provide stereo images in high-resolution and will eventually give three-dimensional imaging for the scientists on Earth.

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/12/china-jade-rabbit-lun...

Unless they had a second spacecraft nearby to take the photo, it would have to be. So it must be an illustrative graphic.

Ah. Thanks.

There are two components up there: the lander, and a small rover. Their announced plan was that after the rover leaves the lander, these two would take pictures of each other and send the pictures back. Note, I haven't seen any of the pictures we're talking about here, so I'm not commenting on what they are.

They were running simulated 3D graphics alongside the other streams to show what was happening...

I think that either the Chinese are culturally less inclined to label things as real-time or simulations, or some Chinese characters on the video I'm too ignorant to read DID say something about that.

Anyway clearly half of that video was a simulation.

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