China Landed Rover on Moon
December 14th, 2013Update: Chinese Rover Landed on Moon and Launched Successfully
Via: CNN:
China’s first lunar rover deployed successfully from the unmanned spacecraft Chang’e-3 that landed on the moon Saturday.
Jade Rabbit (called Yutu in Chinese) is a six-wheeled lunar rover equipped with at least four cameras and two mechanical legs that can dig up soil samples to a depth of 30 meters.
The solar-powered rover will patrol the moon’s surface, studying the structure of the lunar crust as well as soil and rocks, for at least three months. The robot’s name was decided by a public online poll and comes from a Chinese myth about the pet white rabbit of a goddess, Chang’e, who is said to live on the moon.
Weighing 140 kilograms, the slow-moving rover carries an optical telescope for astronomical observations and a powerful ultraviolet camera that will monitor how solar activity affects the various layers — troposphere, stratosphere and ionosphere — that make up the Earth’s atmosphere, China’s information technology ministry said in a statement.
The Jade Rabbit is also equipped with radioisotope heater units, allowing it to function during the cold lunar nights when temperatures plunge as low as -180°C (-292°F).
The moon exploration makes China one of only three nations — after the United States and the former Soviet Union — to “soft-land” on the moon’s surface, and the first to do so in more than three decades.
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Via: BBC:
China is set to land a robotic rover on the surface of the Moon, a major step in the Asian superpower’s ambitious programme of space exploration.
On Saturday afternoon (GMT), a landing module will undergo a powered descent, using thrusters to perform the first soft landing on the Moon in 37 years.
Several hours later, the lander will deploy a robotic rover called Yutu, which translates as “Jade Rabbit”.
The touchdown will take place on a flat plain called the Bay of Rainbows.
The Chang’e-3 mission launched on a Chinese-developed Long March 3B rocket on 1 December from Xichang in the country’s south.
“On the evening of December 14, Chang’e-3 will carry out a soft landing on the lunar surface,” said a post on the mission’s official blog on Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter.
The task was described as the mission’s “most difficult” in the post, written by the Chinese Academy of Sciences on behalf of the space authorities.
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.
Just for the sake of conjecture, I wonder what would happen if some nation’s space program did a complete, detailed exploration of the entire surface of the moon and found absolutely no evidence (such as a US flag) that anyone had been there before? For instance, would octogenarian Buzz Aldrin still punch guys out for claiming the Apollo landing was a hoax?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wcrkxOgzhU
I will be happy to buy him a taser.
http://m.space.com/12796-photos-apollo-moon-landing-sites-lro.html