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China lands rover on Mars

bbc.com

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Re: China lands rover on Mars

#281

Post by Balgair »

thunderbong wrote: post #151

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!

On the code side of these rover and landers, you also have to deal with radiation/vacuum-hardened chips.

From the little I understand, these chips behave a quite a bit different than the types of stuff we work with. For one, you have to assume that your programs will be corrupted via cosmic rays causing bit-flips. Chips are slower and more rigorous as a result.

This being HN, there may be a person on here that can speak more to program design with space rated hardware. I'd love to learn a bit more!

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#282

Post by 908B64B197 »

finnh wrote: post #272
gutfhjkvdsw wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really stealing when the individuals who did the work for America voluntarily left Germany due to its foray into authoritarianism? Seems more like a windfall for a country with better human rights than a theft, to me.

That's not quite how it went down - the really top guys were running the show in Nazi Germany until the very end, and only came to the US after Germany lost the war. See siblings comments about Mittelwerk, eg. Also Chabon's (fictional) novel Moonglow covers some of this history well.

The question is, were they allowed to leave Germany when the regime was still in place?

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#283

Post by rootsudo »

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…

In a sense, it's good competition makes for a good game and achieving greater goals.

e.g. Soviet Union vs United States.

I like it, I welcome it - it begs to open the purse and spend and brings the most creative solutions to the table.

Like computers, boy what a fad!

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#284

Post by adolph »

gutfhjkvdsw wrote: post #268
iso1210 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Is it really stealing when the individuals who did the work for America voluntarily left Germany due to its foray into authoritarianism? Seems more like a windfall for a country with better human rights than a theft, to me.

Operation Paperclip was a secret US intelligence program in which more than 1,600 Nazi scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from Nazi Germany to the United States for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, primarily between 1945 and 1959.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#285

Post by amelius »

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…

> It seems pretty silly to get all up in arms about copying other peoples' stuff.

Wasn't it an American who said "good artists copy, great artists steal"?

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#286

Post by adolph »

tgv wrote: post #216
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…

Not directly relevant to this case, since I don't know anything about these Mars rovers than the superficial stuff from news outlets, but I think that what hurts isn't the copying, but boasting about it, presenting it as your own, not acknowledging the source, etc. A trivial example: a nephew of mine proudly showed his drawings. They were really fantastic for his age, and everyone told him so. Turns out, he drew them…

Hockney derived a new theory of art and optics: around 1430, centuries before anyone suspected it, artists began secretly using cameralike devices, including the lens, the concave mirror and the camera obscura, to help them make realistic-looking paintings. ... Hockney suggests, knew the magic of photographic projection.

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/04/arts/paintings-too-perfec...

T. S. Eliot’s dictum: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.”

https://www.uvu.edu/arts/applause/posts/stealing.html

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#287

Post by vimacs2 »

varispeed wrote: post #261
iso1210 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Germans wouldn't have started the war without loans from the US or help from companies like IBM. So it's not so much as stealing, but rather trying to claw back some of the "investment" when the war machinery started to collapse.

Yeah, this is complete nonsense. The science behind rockets were already being worked on long before WW2 or even the first expansion of territory of the Third Reich beyond the borders set at the closing of WW1.

It's like when people gave credit to Hitler for infrastructure projects such as the Autobahns which were already in progress before he took office.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#288

Post by throwaway74453 »

SigmundA wrote: post #224
4gotunameagain wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Looks like its improved not needing the crane contraption and it seemed to hover for some time deciding exactly where to land.

The reason is that Perseverance is the size and weight of a small SUV (around 1,000 kg) whereas the Chinese lander seems to be only 240 kg, so 1/4 of the weight. That is likely the reason why they were able to land it directly, the way comparably heavy US rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, also landed.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#290

Post by adolph »

noir_lord wrote: post #211
baybal2 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not just a numbers game (though as Stalin said - quantity does have a quality all of it's own). Life is rarely that simple - there are also sociological/societal causes plus the required surrounding infrastructure. China has made dramatic leaps in technological capability but they still can't make a good competitive jet engine and they've been pouring resources into that for literally decades. Even if you have t…

I’d be more inclined to quote and think in terms of Brooks than Stalin since the latter was speaking to tanks iirc, and the former to something more akin to scientists: “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

The US probably also suffers from a surfeit of “scientists” as the Thiel theory would have it, just not as bad of a problem as China.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/peter-thiel/

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