China lands Jade Rabbit robot rover on Moon

[Scientific Playa]

They will be up there mining soon.


China lands Jade Rabbit robot rover on Moon
By Paul Rincon Science editor, BBC News website

The lander has touched down on a flat plain known as Sinus Iridum (the Bay of Rainbows)


China says it has successfully landed a craft carrying a robotic rover on the surface of the Moon, the first soft landing there for 37 years.

On Saturday afternoon (GMT), a landing module used thrusters to touch down, marking the latest step in China's ambitious space exploration programme.

Several hours later, the lander will deploy a robotic rover called Yutu, which translates as "Jade Rabbit".

The touchdown took place on a flat plain called Sinus Iridum.

The Chang'e-3 mission launched atop a Chinese-developed Long March 3B rocket on 1 December from Xichang in the country's south.

ts name - chosen in an online poll of 3.4 million voters - derives from an ancient Chinese myth about a rabbit living on the moon as the pet of the lunar goddess Chang'e.
The rover and lander are powered by solar panels but some sources suggest they also carry radioisotope heating units (RHUs), containing plutonium-238 to keep them warm during the cold lunar night.

Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Washington DC, said China's space programme was a good fit with China's concept of "comprehensive national power". This might be described as a measure of a state's all-round capabilities.

Space exploration was, he told BBC News, "a reflection of your economic power, because you need spare resources to have a space programme. It clearly has military implications because so much space technology is dual use".

He added: "It reflects your scientific and technological capabilities, it supports your diplomacy by making you appear strong.

"China is saying: 'We are doing something that only two other countries have done before - the US and the Soviet Union."

China's space mission team celebrate after the landing

The official Xinhua news service reported that the craft began its descent just after 1300 GMT (2100 Beijing time), touching down in Sinus Iridum (the Bay of Rainbows) 11 minutes later.

State television showed pictures of the moon's surface as the lander touched down and an eye-level view of the landing site was released later on Saturday. Staff at mission control in Beijing clapped and celebrated after confirmation came through.

The probe's soft-landing was the most difficult task during the mission, Wu Weiren, the lunar programme's chief designer, told Xinhua.

It is the third robotic rover mission to land on the lunar surface, but the Chinese vehicle carries a more sophisticated payload, including ground-penetrating radar which will gather measurements of the lunar soil and crust.

"It's still a significant technological challenge to land on another world," said Peter Bond, consultant editor for Jane's Space Systems and Industry told the AP news agency.

"You have to use rocket motors for the descent and you have to make sure you go down at the right angle and the right rate of descent and you don't end up in a crater on top of a large rock."

The landing module actively reduced its speed at about 15km from the Moon's surface.

When it reached a distance of 100m from the surface, the craft fired thrusters to slow its descent.

At a distance of 4m, the lander switched off the thrusters and fell to the lunar surface.

The Jade Rabbit was expected to be deployed several hours after touchdown, driving down a ramp lowered by the landing module.

Reports suggest the lander and rover will photograph each other at some point on Sunday.

According to Chinese space scientists, the mission is designed to test new technologies, gather scientific data and build intellectual expertise.

"China's lunar program is an important component of mankind's activities to explore [the] peaceful use of space," said Sun Huixian, a space engineer with the Chinese lunar programme.

The 120kg (260lb) Jade Rabbit rover can reportedly climb slopes of up to 30 degrees and travel at 200m (660ft) per hour.

 

[Scientific Playa]

Mr Cheng explained that the mission would also advertise the country as a destination for commercial space launches, as well as providing an opportunity to test China's deep-space tracking and communications.

"The rover will reportedly be under Earth control at various points of its manoeuvres on the lunar surface," Mr Cheng wrote in a blog post.

"Such a space observation and tracking system has implications not only for space exploration but for national security, as it can be used to maintain space surveillance, keeping watch over Chinese and other nations' space assets."

China has been methodically and patiently building up the key elements needed for an advanced space programme - from launchers to manned missions in Earth orbit to unmanned planetary craft - and it is investing heavily.

Scientists celebrated at the control centre in Beijing after Chin's first lunar rover touched down

The Jade Rabbit, seen in this artist's impression, is the first wheeled vehicle on the Moon since the 1970s

A giant screen at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center in Beijing showed an animated image of the module landing on the Moon
"China wants to go to the Moon for geostrategic reasons and domestic legitimacy," Prof Joan Johnson-Freese, of the US Naval War College in Rhode Island, told the AFP news agency.

"With the US exploration moribund at best, that opens a window for China to be perceived as the global technology leader - though the US still has more, and more advanced, assets in space."

The landing site is a flat volcanic plain, part of a larger feature known as Mare Imbrium that forms the right eye of the "Man in the Moon".

The lander will operate there for a year, while the rover is expected to work for some three months.

After this, a mission to bring samples of lunar soil back to Earth is planned for 2017. And this may set the stage for further robotic missions, and - perhaps - a crewed lunar mission in the 2020s.

 

[Scientific Playa]

As Rover Lands, China Joins Moon Club
By CHRIS BUCKLEY
HONG KONG — China on Saturday became the third country to steer a spacecraft onto the moon after its unmanned Chang’e-3 probe settled onto the Bay of Rainbows, state-run television reported.

The United States and the Soviet Union are the other countries to have accomplished so-called soft landings on the moon — in which a craft can work after landing — and 37 years have passed since the last such mission.

The successful arrival of the Chang’e-3 after a 13-day journey from Earth was reported on Chinese state television. Chinese news websites displayed what they said was a photograph from the craft of the moon’s surface. At the time of the last soft landing, by the Soviet Union in 1976, Mao Zedong lay a month from death and China was in the twilight of his chaotic Cultural Revolution. Now China, much richer and stronger, aspires to become a globally respected power, and the government sees a major presence in space as a key to acquiring technological prowess, military strength and sheer status.

Chinese media celebrated the landing as a demonstration of the country’s growing scientific stature. Television reports showed engineers at the mission control center in Beijing crying, embracing and taking pictures of one another on their cellphones.

“The dream of the Chinese people across thousands of years of landing on the moon has finally been realized with Chang’e,” said the China News Service, a state-run news agency. “By successfully joining the international deep-space exploration club, we finally have the right to share the resources on the moon with developed countries.”

The Chang’e-3 landing craft carried a solar-powered, robotic rover called the Jade Rabbit, or Yutu in Mandarin Chinese, which was to emerge several hours later to begin exploring Sinus Iridum, or the Bay of Rainbows, a relatively smooth plain formed from solidified lava. According to a Chinese legend, Chang’e is a moon goddess, accompanied by a Jade Rabbit that can brew potions that offer immortality.

“It’s a very ambitious mission in the sense that it’s a rover with a fair amount of instruments on it,” said Andrew Chaikin, a space historian and an expert on lunar travel. The instruments include radar to gather information about what lies as deep as 300 feet below the surface, Chinese space scientists have said.

“There is the potential that some really interesting science could come out of this,” Mr. Chaikin said.

But the mission also embodies China’s broader ambitions in space, other experts said. The Chang’e-3 mission is honing technology for future missions while also emphasizing exploration. The landing craft appears capable of carrying a payload more than a dozen times the weight of the 309-pound rover, Paul D. Spudis, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, said in an email.

“Although it will do some new science, its real value is to flight-qualify a new and potentially powerful lunar surface payload delivery system,” Dr. Spudis said.

A later Chang’e mission, sometime before 2020, is intended to bring back rocks and other samples from the moon, and that will need a larger craft capable of sending a vehicle back to Earth. That mission will also need a more powerful launch rocket, which China is also developing.

Within a decade, China could also become the only country with an operating space station. The International Space Station, which has been open to astronauts from 15 countries, is due to be decommissioned by 2020, and China’s own, much smaller station could be ready to go up about the same time, if preparations go smoothly. China is not among the countries allowed to use the international station.

Despite its benign name, China’s Jade Rabbit rover could kindle anxieties among some American politicians and policy makers that the United States risks losing its pre-eminence in space in coming decades. China’s opaque space bureaucracy is overseen by the military, and that has magnified wariness. Legislation passed by Congress in 2011 bars NASA from bilateral contacts with China, although multilateral contacts are not proscribed.

In the past, some Chinese space engineers have also enthusiastically endorsed eventually taking astronauts to the moon and back, which would make China the second country, after the United States, to achieve that feat. China sent its first astronaut into space in 2003.

A policy paper in 2011 said China would “conduct studies on the preliminary plan for a human lunar landing,” but the government has not made any decision on a manned mission, said Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor at the United States Naval War College in Rhode Island who researches China’s space activities.

“Certainly, they are putting all the building blocks in place so that if they make that policy decision, they can move forward,” said Professor Johnson-Freese. “But the Chinese are not risk-takers. They are not going to approve that program until they are sure they are capable of all those building blocks.”

 

[The_King_of_Everything]

Aliens

 

[Bud Bundy]

damn china is coming for our ass.

 

[Leasy]

Good Job we need to focus on the technological aspects instead of war.

 

[ThatTruth777]

Good Job we need to focus on the technological aspects instead of war.

hmph... good luck

 

[无名的]

Meanwhile, majority of Chinese still shytting in buckets.

 

[HollowPoints2]

china isn't playing around.