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!
China lands rover on Mars
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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?
Re: China lands rover on Mars
#173Does anyone have plans to land on Venus? Is that way more difficult or something?
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
#174Earlier 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…
Re: China lands rover on Mars
#175Earlier 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.
Re: China lands rover on Mars
#176Look 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.
Re: China lands rover on Mars
#177It 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.
Re: China lands rover on Mars
#178Look 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.
Also, research on how to even survive Mars lets us help keep Earth’s ecosystem in better shape.
Re: China lands rover on Mars
#179Just 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
#180It'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.
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.