Chinese Chang'e3+Yutu going to land on the Moon on Saturday December 14th

namloc1980

apollo8

Awesome pics guys movie below

shedweller

mickmackey1 wrote: »

It's quite incredible that SkyandTelescope have nothing about this on their home page

They're sickened, thats why. Plain and simple sickened.

Well done China though and feck the begrudgers!

apollo8

mickmackey1 wrote: »

It's quite incredible that SkyandTelescope have nothing about this on their home page

They have updated page now:)

caoty

With the LATEST of Mandela's funeral arrangement?:rolleyes:

apollo8 wrote: »

They have updated page now:)

DrGuy

slade_x wrote: »

Yes they are tiny, they are 1:22 scale models

The real rover weights over 100kg and is about 1.5 metres tall. The total landing mass including lander is greater than that of a 2014 Toyota Corolla

Correction: The rover weighs over 980 Newtons (N) on Earth, or over 160 N on the Moon. It has a mass of over 100 kg, which remains constant regardless of the acceleration of gravity.

My apologies for calling this out, but the widespread misuse of g and kg as weight is one of my pet peeves.

DrGuy

I'm hoping maybe the USA and the EU will get a clue and dramatically increase spaceflight, technology, and science budgets.

ThatDrGuy

DrGuy wrote: »

I'm hoping maybe the USA and the EU will get a clue and dramatically increase spaceflight, technology, and science budgets.

Yeah, to hell with those desperately needed social and environmental funds nevermind such lowly concerns as medical research. Lets race dune buggies on the moon!

apollo8

caoty wrote: »

With the LATEST of Mandela's funeral arrangement?:rolleyes:

im sorry i dont know what you re seeing but i clearly see reports on Chang'e3+Yutu

DrGuy

ThatDrGuy wrote: »

Yeah, to hell with those desperately needed social and environmental funds nevermind such lowly concerns as medical research. Lets race dune buggies on the moon!

Medical research is heavily funded in comparison with the space programs or other sciences. I work in the environmental field, and we used spaced-based technology to do our work. Human spaceflight and missions such as these help generate interest in the sciences and technology. Many of the technologies and products developed for spacecraft have real utility down here on Earth, improve the quality of life, and provide needed employment.

ThatDrGuy

DrGuy wrote: »

Medical research is heavily funded in comparison with the space programs or other sciences. I work in the environmental field, and we used spaced-based technology to do our work. Human spaceflight and missions such as these help generate interest in the sciences and technology. Many of the technologies and products developed for spacecraft have real utility down here on Earth, improve the quality of life, and provide needed employment.

Not near heavily funded enough. I assume you use satellites which are cheap as chips in comparison with deep space missions. So does star trek ( it costs about a million times less than a human space flight program). The ESA website had a page devoted to space spin-offs over the last ten years - number one was technology to prevent your crisps getting crushed as they were packed. What a bargain for only 42.8 billion euro in funding. If you want to get research results you don't invest in A & hope it will improve B. You research B. As for employment we could hire people to dig holes and more people to fill them in. It would waste a lot less resources. The ISS cost 100,000,000,000 dollars. Which do you think would have generated more research output - giving a million PHD students a grant of 100,000 dollars or building the ISS? I'll give a hint: The research output of the ISS is a joke.

caoty

the Jade rabbit and the landing craft taking photos of each other

2 stroke

ThatDrGuy wrote: »

The ISS cost 100,000,000,000 dollars. Which do you think would have generated more research output - giving a million PHD students a grant of 100,000 dollars or building the ISS? I'll give a hint:

That $100,000,000,000 isn't floating around in space. It trickles through pockets back into government hands again, to be reallocated, maybe it goes to medical research next. In the meantime, amongst other things, it goes towards the education of workers children, possibly as research scientists.
If every penny on earth was only spent on medical research, we'd all starve to death.

JupiterKid

Congratulations to China on this achievement!

It's also great to see new Moon surface images - the first in almost 40 years.:cool:

DrGuy

ThatDrGuy wrote: »

Not near heavily funded enough. I assume you use satellites which are cheap as chips in comparison with deep space missions.

If you're talking about small satellites, e.g., DMC-2 or Deimos, which are built by Surrey Satellite, or micro-satellites, then yes. But the bulk of my work uses much larger satellites which are spectrally and radiometrically superior, and can cost up to $1 Billion. Earth observation, like the rest of the sciences, is underfunded. Furthermore, simply allocating the money elsewhere isn't going to help anyone in the long run. Those satellites I was talking about are actually used to see where crops are doing well and where they are doing poorly, so we now have a good idea when and where famines are likely to occur.

As for deep space- there are large asteroids and comets out there that can and do impact Earth, and this investment in space technology and research will allow us to protect ourselves against them. Millions could die because we shortsightedly failed to do the research needed to protect our planet.

namloc1980

Full landing video. This is cool.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaQTSTrbT3w

space2ground1

namloc1980 wrote: »

Full landing video. This is cool.

Crikey it was descending pretty fast!

shedweller

What i'm puzzled at is how sharp the descent went from almost horizontal to nearly vertical. I would have thought it would transition in a smooth curve. Unless the lander held its orientation while the engine gimballed to match the curve??

In any case it is nice to see a new lunar landing video. Maybe we aren't going back to the stone age after all!

Taylor365

The Chinese, a great bunch of lads!

ThatDrGuy

2 stroke wrote: »

That $100,000,000,000 isn't floating around in space. It trickles through pockets back into government hands again, to be reallocated, maybe it goes to medical research next. In the meantime, amongst other things, it goes towards the education of workers children, possibly as research scientists.
If every penny on earth was only spent on medical research, we'd all starve to death.

Ah trickle down economics. Is there any daft idea they can't lend merit to?
While the trickle is trickling, a torrent of research is not being funded. That's marginal cost: The cost of funding one thing over another, the cost of one white elephant space station is the cost of not funding a million PHD students. Most money stays in circulation - whether its wasted or used constructively is a whole different matter...

If we spent every penny on fatuous analogies we would starve too.

ThatDrGuy

DrGuy wrote: »

If you're talking about small satellites, e.g., DMC-2 or Deimos, which are built by Surrey Satellite, or micro-satellites, then yes. But the bulk of my work uses much larger satellites which are spectrally and radiometrically superior, and can cost up to $1 Billion. Earth observation, like the rest of the sciences, is underfunded. Furthermore, simply allocating the money elsewhere isn't going to help anyone in the long run. Those satellites I was talking about are actually used to see where crops are doing well and where they are doing poorly, so we now have a good idea when and where famines are likely to occur.

As for deep space- there are large asteroids and comets out there that can and do impact Earth, and this investment in space technology and research will allow us to protect ourselves against them. Millions could die because we shortsightedly failed to do the research needed to protect our planet.

As an environmental scientist can you hand on heart tell me that a thousand million dollars spent on a satellite is more useful at preventing famine than investing that thousand million dollars in crop research, irrigation systems, sustainable agriculture, community projects and transport infrastructure? I doubt it somehow. Granted space investment could potentially result in detection and deflection of an earth threatening asteroid. How that justifies spending 100,000,000,000 dollars to keep a handful of humans orbiting around the planet baffles me. The budget for the entire asteroid detection project at NASA is only 20 million dollars. Japans asteroid missions cost between 300-400 million dollars a pop. We could have sent an entire fleet of robot's to the asteroids to study them and massively increased the asteroid detection and warning system for a tiny fraction of the cost of that white elephant.

Hmmzis

ThatDrGuy wrote: »

As an environmental scientist can you hand on heart tell me that a thousand million dollars spent on a satellite is more useful at preventing famine than investing that thousand million dollars in crop research, irrigation systems, sustainable agriculture, community projects and transport infrastructure?

Well, first you need to know what areas are at risk of crop failures that could or will lead to famine. The best way to gather that data is from orbit.
Another point here is that the world doesn't quite have food underproduction issue. It's more of a distribution problem and that is mostly rooted in politics and financial interests. Also the logistcs are problematic in a lot of cases and also here satellites can help a lot by collecting valuable data about the regions at risk.

Capt'n Midnight

2 stroke wrote: »

Thanks, I guess I shouldn't believe everything I read on the internet. I thought if it produced enough electricty to keep it warm at night, it wouldnt be too difficult to power a few instruments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_%28spacecraft%29#Solar_panels

Juno is the first mission to Jupiter using solar panels instead of the radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) used by Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, the Voyager program, Cassini–Huygens, New Horizons and the Galileo orbiter. Once in orbit around Jupiter, Juno will receive 4% as much sunlight as we do on Earth, but the global shortage of Pu-238, as well as advances made in both solar-cell technology and efficiency over the past several decades, makes it economically preferable to use solar panels of practical size to provide power at a distance of 5 AU from the Sun.

Image for scale - the lander is a lot bigger than I thought
http://www.space.com/23786-china-moon-rover-mission-photos-change3-lander.html

Capt'n Midnight

ThatDrGuy wrote: »

As for employment we could hire people to dig holes and more people to fill them in. It would waste a lot less resources. The ISS cost 100,000,000,000 dollars. Which do you think would have generated more research output - giving a million PHD students a grant of 100,000 dollars or building the ISS? I'll give a hint: The research output of the ISS is a joke.

The ISS like the shuttle before it is a money pit

$150 Bn for 450 tonnes is $1m for 3kg = $10,000 per 30g.
So roughly 8 times today's price of $1,203.5 for 28.3495g of Gold

Compared to MIR or what the Indians or Russians or Chinese are spending it's staggering waste.

DrGuy wrote: »

I'm hoping maybe the USA and the EU will get a clue and dramatically increase spaceflight, technology, and science budgets.

ESA has spent the last twenty years developing Gaia. Can't wait for the pictures This will generate insane volumes of data , PhD's for years


Bolivia has a satellite
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-25471206

The satellite, also known as Tksat-1, cost $302m (£185m) and was financed by the China Development Bank.
...
The device, weighing more than 5.2 tonnes, will speed up and improve the quality of telephone and internet connections in Bolivia.

"It will enable us to check the composition of the soil and produce an inventory of our natural resources. It will also be used to monitor urban growth and help agriculture," Mr Zambrana told La Razon newspaper.

caoty

Where is the track?

Rhys Essien

Interesting that the second Soviet Moon Rover 'Lunokhod 2' was 6 times heavier than Jade Rabbit.It was photographed last year by the lunar orbiter.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_2

Rhys Essien

Latest pics

http://d1jqu7g1y74ds1.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Change-3-1st-Pano_Ken-Kremer.jpg


http://english.sina.com/china/2013/1220/657152.html


Jade Rabbit is now gone to sleep for two weeks.
http://english.sina.com/technology/2013/1225/658306.html

Capt'n Midnight

Rhys Essien wrote: »

Interesting that the second Soviet Moon Rover 'Lunokhod 2' was 6 times heavier than Jade Rabbit

No it's much closer than that. I'm not sure if either figure includes fuel which would account for about 50% of the mass.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_2 The lander and rover together massed 1814 kg.

http://www.universetoday.com/107196/chinas-maiden-lunar-rover-yutu-rolls-6-wheels-onto-the-moon-photo-and-video-gallery/

the 120 kg Yutu rover will begin driving in a circle around the 1200 kg lander.

_Tombstone_

The Undead Yutu Rover Probes the Moon’s Unique Volcanic Past

_Tombstone_

caoty wrote: »

Where is the track?

Here it is







:P


China just released hundreds of never before seen pics of the Moon in True Colour.

If you look closely at some of them, you can just make out where they photo shopped out the Alien Base.

http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/30/china-just-released-true-color-hd-photos-of-the-moon/