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China lands rover on Mars

bbc.com

171–180 of 359 posts

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#171

For me what has always been amazingly fascinating about all of these missions (even more so for the Voyager missions) is to be able to work with so much latency! In today's world, where we are used to working with millisecond latencies across thousands of kilometers, just to be able to do something with latency of minutes to tens of hours, boggles my mind! Amazing accomplishment of humankind!

When the Voyager missions were launched most of the world didn't have international calling. So making a call from lets say Somalia to the US, involved finding a post office with the only international line in town and "booking" a call. Which meant you had to walk over and write down your name (and if you were lucky enough to have a local landline your 4 digit phone number) in a ledger and then walk back home to sit by the phone, for two days to a week, before the operator would call up to tell you the line was available. If the exchange wasn't sophisticated enough to forward the call, you then had to drop everything you were doing and walk back to the post office to use the line. Now think about how anything worked with that level of latency :)

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#172

>Now that Zhurong has got down successfully, scientists will try to get at least 90 Martian days of service out of it, studying the local geology. 90 days, doesn't that seem short?

If it is anything like other Chinese goods, i doubt it will even last 90 days. Lol. But I'm sure the Amazon listing for the probe would have 100k positive reviews, even though they probably only made a couple of these.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#173

Does anyone have plans to land on Venus? Is that way more difficult or something?

Russians landed 10 probes successfully and took pictures and did the science. Venera 13 lander survived for 127 minutes.

You can shield the probes from sulfuric acid and pressure, but it's hard to keep electronics cool for longer than few hours. Mean surface temperature is 464 °C. (867 °F). Doing science experiments is even harder.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#174
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All things considered, 90 days is pretty good for how harsh of an environment Mars can be. Also, there are dozens of ways to make the mission last longer but no ways of accomplishing that without adding more weight.

This makes me think about the way we define “harsh”. What’s actually so harsh about Mars? Let’s imagine some alien civilization tries to send a probe to Earth, they’d be saying things like: “Dude, that atmosphere is gonna burn our shit up before it even touches ground, if we’re not careful.” “Holy shit, what are these huge animals with long noses and big ears? They’re gonna destroy our probe if they walk over it.” “L…

The harshest part for any machine on Mars is the lack of nearby humans to aid or repair it.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#175
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes!! Moreover, China has optimized the process of massively scale production of everything. This is good as it decreases prices. Seeing it as a global humanity achievement... this is great.

Scale of production has never been the problem, achieving escape velocity is. We need to invent fuels that weigh less to have any hope of getting enough stuff into space to undertake any seriously large achievements.

The fuel cost means that almost all of us are destined to spend our lives here on earth. Only a handful will have the privilege of going up in a rocket.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#176

Look all the copy comments aside, the future of the human race is getting off this rock we live on. Congratulations on the success of this mission. It moves all of humanity forward.

If the human race wants to have a future, we need to take care of the planet we live on, not assume we can slash-and-burn our way through new environments whenever we trash our home too badly.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#177

It makes me concerned thinking about what kind of biological contamination this rover might have brought to Mars that may seriously hamper the search for signs of past native life. JPL is very forthcoming about their cleanliness procedures, China not so much. And they don’t exactly have a great track record in this respect.

Interesting point. Do you have any examples of previous problems regarding cleanliness?

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#178
post #176

Look all the copy comments aside, the future of the human race is getting off this rock we live on. Congratulations on the success of this mission. It moves all of humanity forward.

If the human race wants to have a future, we need to take care of the planet we live on, not assume we can slash-and-burn our way through new environments whenever we trash our home too badly.

We need to do both.

Also, research on how to even survive Mars lets us help keep Earth’s ecosystem in better shape.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#179
To the (flagged) comments about China stealing research: I’ll abstract from lack of evidence.

Just stealing isn’t enough. Russia, I believe, ended up admitting stealing research on the Space Shuttle, and despite that their own project never really materialised. Even. You steal, that lets you catch up, not overtake.

So even if China is helping themselves (again, I don’t know), they still have to innovate and improve. Good on them if they do. And then, their own technology is also ripe for the taking if that’s how the game works.

It’s all progress one way or the other.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#180
post #7

It's impressive how far China has come in just 2 decades. How significant is this achievement space technology wise? I still remember the first rover on Mars and it was a really big deal in my eyes back then.

I think it’s very significant. Interplanetary navigation and retro propulsive soft landings are tricky to get right. Several recent lunar missions have failed and historically about half of missions to Mars crapped out. China is rapidly racking up a very solid track record with their lunar and now Mars landings. Also rovers are a significant step up in complexity and capability from static landers.

The Long March 8 architecture looks like it’s suitable for adaptation for first stage recovery, and they have expressed the intention to attempt it, so China are lining up to overtake Russia as the strongest competitor to the US in space technology.

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