Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

China lands rover on Mars

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 359 posts

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#201

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

kstenerud wrote: post #188

It seems pretty silly to get all up in arms about copying other peoples' stuff. That's how humanity has innovated throughout the ages: Copy what works and innovate on top of it. None of our inventions arise from a vacuum. Cars are still as wide as Roman chariots for good reason. Power transfer uses the same base principles as were in play during the dawn of steam engines and before. Energy conversion has been an iter…

The absurdity of the "it's stealing" position is obvious when you imagine what the world would look like if everybody suddenly decided each country is doing only their own research and is not allowed to use any external idea. It would be utterly ridiculous. Copying-and-improving is the default, it's what makes us move forward as humanity. Everything else is just politics and national pride.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#202

Post by KuiN »

hliyan wrote: post #3

Now that more and more countries are getting into space exploration, I wonder how long it will be before commercial companies start developing and selling space probe platforms (just like launch platforms now).

This is already common in the satellite world. Companies design & build satellite platforms (usually called "buses" for sats) that satellite developers build on top of. Usually provides the core physical structure, plus attachments for payloads or sensors; some more advanced ones also include stuff like avionics, power distribution etc. Wikipedia has some interesting examples [0].

Photon mentioned in a sibling comment builds on that idea by providing a bus with engines to make it into a simple spacecraft. I don't know of any off-the-shelf rover platforms yet but can absolutely see the same thing happening when there's enough demand / cost of access to places worth roving around is cheaper.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_bus

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#203

Post by siliconunit »

smitty1110 wrote: post #128
chmod600 wrote: post #125

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

Not that I know of, Venus is kinda crazy. 90 ATM pressure, -1 pH acid rain, about 700 K temperatures at night, it's pretty absurd. Unless you want to make a probe out of solid Tungsten, you're probably out of luck. And good luck getting that out of low earth orbit, that would be stupidly heavy.

They are going for a fully mechanical automaton probe apparently, no electronics, very interesting approach. https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/space-robots/jp...

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#204

Post by baybal2 »

rich_sasha wrote: post #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.…

The stone cold fact is that China has n-times engineers than USA, mostly working for the same American companies who outsourced their RnD, and engineering decades ago, and working on mostly the same things.

It strikes me every time hearing such argument from people completely oblivious to the above fact.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#205

Post by messe »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #149
Animats wrote: post #130

China Daily has a nice animation of the landing process.[1] So far, though, no live video. [1] http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202105/15/WS609f18aaa31024...

Ah, someone copied our homework again :) I hope that more things on Mars are a net positive anyway, regardless the nation.

Oh you mean the combination of parachutes and retrorockets pioneered by the Soviet Union with their Mars 3 lander?

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#206

Post by Symmetry »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #201
kstenerud wrote: post #188

It seems pretty silly to get all up in arms about copying other peoples' stuff. That's how humanity has innovated throughout the ages: Copy what works and innovate on top of it. None of our inventions arise from a vacuum. Cars are still as wide as Roman chariots for good reason. Power transfer uses the same base principles as were in play during the dawn of steam engines and before. Energy conversion has been an iter…

The absurdity of the "it's stealing" position is obvious when you imagine what the world would look like if everybody suddenly decided each country is doing only their own research and is not allowed to use any external idea. It would be utterly ridiculous. Copying-and-improving is the default, it's what makes us move forward as humanity. Everything else is just politics and national pride.

"They're only copying" was also an accusation famously leveled by Britain against the US (see Lowell[1] and The Pirates of Penzance[2]) and by the US against Japan around the turn of the 20th century. Copying complex technologies is hard and countries that are able to succeed at it usually go on to become innovative.

[1]https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance#Backgr...

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#207

Post by vagrantJin »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #152

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.

Odd.

Sending a rover to another planet is an engineering feat. Your worry is the Chinese space agency and its staff dont know how to decontaminate?

That is properly odd of not myopic.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#208

Post by RocketMan9999 »

I'm a Chinese guy and I don't like this at all. Here's some Chinese perspective:

1. The CNSA is severely underfunded in recent years, to the extent that a considerable amount of space tech graduates went directly into other more "lucrative" fields such as the IT industry.

2. This landing operation was not announced beforehand. This is a bit unusual, when compared to the past operations, e. g. the first manned space flight, where the national news network kept broadcasting the whole event. The CNSA seemed a little unconfident about it.

3. This year is the 100th anniversary for the CCP.

4. Given 1, 2 and 3, and how things work in the PRC, this Mars landing thing is more likely a "present" for the CCP anniversary, intended to strive for more funding. If the operation failed, they'd probably postpone the whole announcement till a more "proper" time, since nobody even know they tried to land the rover.

So, the current atmosphere in the CNSA may be a little tense. A failure may make them lose their already-tiny funding, and they did this (at this timing) to please the CCP in order to get more support. I respect all those engineers and scientists who made the marvel achievement, but this is not a pretty scene. And as a Chinese, I don't like it at all.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#209

Post by iso1210 »

kstenerud wrote: post #188

It seems pretty silly to get all up in arms about copying other peoples' stuff. That's how humanity has innovated throughout the ages: Copy what works and innovate on top of it. None of our inventions arise from a vacuum. Cars are still as wide as Roman chariots for good reason. Power transfer uses the same base principles as were in play during the dawn of steam engines and before. Energy conversion has been an iter…

> Crying "No fair! You stole it!" sounds more like a petulant child than anything else.

It's also exactly what made nasa in the first place, with America stealing much of rocket science from the Germans in the wake of WW2.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#210

Post by Symmetry »

BuyMyBitcoins wrote: post #29
ClosedPistachio wrote: post #2

>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?

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.

It is harsh and famously hard to land successfully on. But if a country can operate rovers on the Moon and is able to get their rover down to the surface in without breaking it then I'd expect it to work.
Post reply on HN