China's Nuclear Rover Will Sample the Moon 134
HansonMB writes "After launching on one of the nation's Long March rockets and a three-day transit, Chang'E 3 will reach the Moon and enter into a 62 mile orbit. Once settled, the 2,645 pound lander will separate from the roughly 8,200 pound spacecraft and descend into a highly elliptical orbit 62 by 9.5 miles above the surface." Russia wants a taste, too, and plans a moon-sampling mission set for 2015.
Days of humans in space coming to an end? (Score:2)
Re:Days of humans in space coming to an end? (Score:5, Funny)
They tend not to open the pod bay door when you need it most
Re:Days of humans in space coming to an end? (Score:4, Interesting)
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If you weren't there you wouldn't need to open the pod bay door in the first place!
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Ezekiel 23:20
I wish people would stop quoting the Bible all the time. Also, that's not really what it says at Ezekiel 23:20, if I'm any judge.
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I find I have to apolgise for my bad jokes again :-), sorry. It was just that the way it showed in my browser, it looked like a Bible quote.
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I'm increasingly having trouble remembering why it seemed like a space mission would be so much cooler with a person onboard.
Because everyone was overly optimistic about the non-influence of stellar and galactic radiation on the human body and about the way how living in cramped conditions with the same group of people for two years risking death every day tends to keep your psyche shipshape.
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living in cramped conditions with the same group of people for two years risking death every day
Living in cramped conditions with the same group of people for lengthy periods of time risking death, that also roughly describes Columbus's early voyages. The full duration of the first voyage was seven months. Not that far off from estimates for a Mars voyage.
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Living in cramped conditions with the same group of people for lengthy periods of time risking death, that also roughly describes Columbus's early voyages. The full duration of the first voyage was seven months. Not that far off from estimates for a Mars voyage.
Personally, I'd go with Magellan for this analogy. With desert islands. With no natives to help you.
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The voyages of Columbus and Magellan cost their countries a larger proportion of their GNP than the entire Apollo program cost the US.
I would really, really like a citation for that. I simply have no idea what the costs were for those voyages.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyages_of_Christopher_Columbus#Funding_campaign [wikipedia.org]
I'm not saying he was right or wrong, I'm just saying that's a citation of the funding.
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My original source is one of the Asimov or Sagan books in my office. Not sure which, unfortunately.
Re:Days of humans in space coming to an end? (Score:4, Insightful)
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How many spaceships are these these days?
More than zero. We have experience with spaceships, both their manufacture and use. We're not going from square one. Hence, it makes sense to push the envelope and use them in places where we haven't been yet.
How much technology and resources are required to go to space?
We already know the answer to that. Not very much. It's about 100 tons of material per person to get to Mars. And as noted befo
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You are not that desperate, are you??
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You do understand that the "flower" is about a tenth of an inch wide, right? So if someone was on Mars the only way they would be finding it would be to take hi-res pictures of rocks and look at them. Pretty much the same thing Curiosity is doing.
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If Apollo 13 didn't have people on board to fix the issue after the O2 tank failure, they would never have made it home. Of course, if they didn't send people, they wouldn't have needed the O2, or needed to return. So there is that.
Also, they didn't actually fix anything since if they had *fixed* the problem, they would have been able to complete the mission. They would have needed a much larger toolbox to do any useful repair and they'd still miss the O2 after the repair.
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I'm increasingly having trouble remembering why it seemed like a space mission would be so much cooler with a person onboard
I would think this should be more obvious, but it's "cooler" for the people onboard. Do you think it would have been a whole lot cooler if the Spanish had just sent robots to the New World?
Humans are going to colonize space, and it's not for your personal entertainment, but because people with a spirit of exploration want to see what's out there and want to set foot on and colonize
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I wish the analogy between crossing the Atlantic Ocean vs. traveling 12 light years to Tau Ceti were better than it is. I really don't think the technologies currently in use for space travel are even steps in the right direction towards tra
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Humans are going to colonize space, and it's not for your personal entertainment, but because people with a spirit of exploration want to see what's out there and want to set foot on and colonize new worlds.
Great. They can do it with their own money then.
The early settlers didn't migrate to the New World for the purposes of entertaining those back home.
No, for the most part they went there to get rich. The lumber alone on a plot of almost-free land was worth a fortune in the old world. But there'
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Great. They can do it with their own money then.
The Mars One project is intended to be funded by private money, so you sound a bit ignorant about what's happening in the field.
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Last year's Pentagon budget was larger than the cost of the entire program to put humans on the moon. Let's see, advance science and technology, or improve our methods of slaughter? Which one is going to benefit the country, the species and the world more? Or do we give priority to the profit margins of our congresscritters' biggest donors? Decisions, decisions . . .
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Look, I know it's popular with kids today to be all cynical about space with "ooh, space, never gonna happen
I'm probably older than you. My cynicism is born of experience.
The Mars One project current estimate is $6 billion
This is a really good indication these people don't have the first clue about what they're doing.
Because governments are too close? (Score:5, Insightful)
Colonize space? Why? 3/4 of our planet is ocean, how about colonize that first? Deserts? Hint: it will be much cheaper and possible with today's technology without major sacrifices. So... where are the underwater cities, etc? No takers?
Because governments are too close?
For example, when the Republic of Minerva attempted to create an independent micronation by colonizing an area of the ocean, the US paid Tonga to claim it for the Kingdom of Tonga so the millionaires who were trying to found it couldn't get out from under existing national sovereignties.
For a lot of people willing to fly away to the far reaches of space, the limiting factor has always been the cost of getting out of the gravity well in the first place. The DC-X (Delta Clipper) would have remedied this, but it was killed off McDonnell Douglas as part of them being eaten by Boeing, in favor of the National Aerospace plane, which never materialized, and would have needed runways and to boost additional equipment to do landings out there, where there are no runways for the plane to use (an intentional limitation of the plane).
I can understand governments being wary of cheap access to space (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment#Project_Thor [wikipedia.org] should probably not be put in practical reach of well to do Facebook emloyees, and more than you'd want them to have tactical nuclear weapons at their disposal).
That it would cost a whole hell of a lot for a cat's paw to fly up and try to claim the territory out from under them is a major advantage of basing something like this in space, and therefore a major draw to colonization efforts there.
There are also people even crazier than that who believe that it's mankind's Manifest Detiny to expand to fill the solar system, and from there the nearby stars, then on to the galaxy, and then on to the rest of the universe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny [wikipedia.org] .
Either way, it means either getting rid of the small minds in the way, or working around them. Local end runs, like Minerva, have failed, and if you are just going to be an extension of an existing nation, and are in the top 1% of wealth there anyway, you can be a hell of a lot more comfortable under their thumb without going anywhere than you can be doing subsistence fish-farming on a floating city in the middle of the Pacific being a damn sight less comfortablr, and then finding yourself *still* under their thumb anyway.
Colonies are built by political refugees, economic refugees, indentured servants, disinherited heirs, bastard progeny, and, in general, people looking for a better life than the one they have now. For everyone in the middle class and higher, that's basically unavailable here on Earth, "better" being a relative term, and with orbital costs being artificially inflated, anyone below that level of wealth can't hope to go anywhere, except local regional border crossings, in the hope of a better life.
So you get a bunch of nerds, in the middle class and higher, where do you think they will be pointing their colony ships, Antarctica? It might work, but you are more likely to get booted off by whoever "protects" that section of Antarctica from someone doing that under the Antarctic Treaty http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty [wikipedia.org] which was designed to prevent something like that ever happening.
The closest you're going to get on-planet is taking over an existing state, and Charles Taylor pretty much nailed the door shut on that in 1960: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Taylor_(Liberia) [wikipedia.org]
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Colonize space? Why? 3/4 of our planet is ocean, how about colonize that first? Deserts?
Both are colonized. In the case of deserts, there are very large cities such as Phoenix in the US or Dubai in the UAE, In the case of the sea, colonization is done via ship.
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Just because "somebody" gets to have an experience doesn't mean I do
If you want to experience this, why not apply as a volunteer for the Mars One project [mars-one.com]?
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“These days, there seems to be nowhere left to explore. Victims of their very success, the explorers now, pretty much, stay home. Maybe it's a little early- maybe the time is not quite yet- but those other worlds, promising untold opportunities, beckon. Just now, there a great many matt
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Re:Days of humans in space coming to an end? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah... US will return to the moon in 2015. Just after NASA builds a vehicle to replace the retired space shuttles, in 2014; it will be called "Crew Exploration Vehicle". And, once on the Moon, the Americans will start building a permanent base there, as an avant-post for manned missions to Mars.
Nice re-reading science-fiction classics, especially George W. Bush [slashdot.org].
On the other hand, I can't deplore enough the change in the mind-set. From
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, etc
to why send humans when you can just send robots... in only 50 years.
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Nah... US will return to the moon in 2015. Just after NASA builds a vehicle to replace the retired space shuttles, in 2014;
The shuttles were never going to be any help in going to the moon. Far too heavy to do anything more than low earth orbit. Thats why the ISS is in such a low orbit and has problems with atmospheric drag; because the Americans couldn't build a reusable vehicle that didn't have wings and a tail plane. Because the military insisted that it could land in the USA in case it was carrying a classified payload. So the shuttle was a cripple. And a deathtrap.
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Well, actually, there's not much of a change in the mindset: in the heydays of the space race, almost exactly 50 years ago, on January 15, 1973 the Lunkhod 2 landed on Moon - it was the second "robot" (it was more of an RC car) that Russia sent to the Moon (the first one landed in 1970).
So the "why send humans when you can just send robots" is not really a new question.
Re:Days of humans in space coming to an end? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why send humans when you can just send robots.
Why send robots when you just not send anything at all? At some point, you are assuming that there's something valuable to do in space. Else just not doing anything is the correct choice.
As it turns out both robots and humans have their place in space activities. Robots are the obvious winners for virtually all extreme exploration, such as sending something out for the first time (the unmanned probes that were part of the Apollo program and used to scout possible sites and try out landing technology), to an environment that simply is not survivable (for example, a one way trip into the atmospheres of Jupiter or Venus), or lasts a ridiculous length of time (the Voyager missions).
Robots are also good for easily automated tasks such as imaging and communications. And as the software improves, one can expect more such tasks to be automated.
Humans are better for missions that have a lot of complexity and on site decision making. The Apollo program contains a good example of human activity that couldn't be readily duplicated by an affordable amount of robotics on Mars. Overall human time on the Moon was something like three or four weeks of human time (including the fact that there were two people on each of the half dozen missions that made it to the Moon).
For example, consider the scientific missions to Mars over the past forty years. Each of the last three lunar missions duplicated the basic feats of any of the rovers on Mars, but in a couple of days rather than a number of years. And a powerful component of the Apollo program was the sample return, which still generates considerable academic activity today.
People tend to forget that a manned mission could generate as much scientific knowledge in a few weeks as the unmanned landers and rovers have over the past last forty years. And that's a good use of humanity's real strength, the Earthside infrastructure that has had to make do with a remarkably thin gruel for four decades.
There's also the goal of eventual colonization of space. One has to use humans at some point in order to further that goal beyond a rudimentary level.
Coming to a beginning (Score:2)
Why send humans when you can just send robots
This just reveals a lack of imagination. Yes we've been delayed so far in getting to space, but robots are going to pave the way for an exponential explosion of humans in space. We'll soon be able to do things like send teams of robots in advance to do automated construction of infrastructure (eg. build housing, build automated greenhouses, build solar mini-stations, and this is just with technology that we'll see within the next 15 to 30 years), that will make
Re:Days of humans in space coming to an end? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why send humans when you can just send robots.
Why go yourself when you can send someone else?
Why ride a horse when you can get someone else to ride a horse for you?
Why make love to a real pretty girl when you can get someone else to do it for you?
Why not just kill yourself now and get your lack of involvement in life over with?
We do things ourselves, go places ourselves, because that is part of what makes us human, we participate in life the universe and everything.
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It is false dichotomy. The choice is not between say, sending a robot or a human to Mars.
It is between spending 20 billions on human spaceflight and having footsteps on Mars and some samples, or spending the same on robots and having Martian samples, plus a geophysical network on Mars, plus a Neptune orbiter, plus in situ studies of Titan and Europa.
Robots are merely an extension of our senses. The use of tools, from the bow and arrow to the Mars rover is what made our species successful. Clinging to the ou
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It is false dichotomy. The choice is not between say, sending a robot or a human to Mars.
It is between spending 20 billions on human spaceflight and having footsteps on Mars and some samples, or spending the same on robots and having Martian samples, plus a geophysical network on Mars, plus a Neptune orbiter, plus in situ studies of Titan and Europa.
Robots are merely an extension of our senses. The use of tools, from the bow and arrow to the Mars rover is what made our species successful. Clinging to the outdated notion that you have to do everything in person never was.
Ok so build a robot to have sex for you. Its not a false dichotomy at all. It could save your life, what if she has HIV? It could save you money (on a paternity suit).
Robots are no WAY an extension of our senses. Its not at all the same as a tool like a bow and arrow, although I'll give you theres a profound difference between the satisfaction of beating someones brains out with a club and a 1km+ headshot with a sniper rifle.
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Robots will do the job as soon as one can look at something and say "Hey, that's odd..." and apply insight to determine what's worth a closer look, outside pre-programmed observational parameters.
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Why fuck when you can just have a doctor impregnate your wife with a few tools?
Or, for her, why fuck when you can just donate an egg for a test tube baby?
Why attend classes if you can just send a robot to proxy for you?
Why go on vacation, when plenty of photographers are willing to sell you images and sounds of Cancun?
Why own a home, when you can just sleep in the subway, or under a bridge, and tape up some photos of nice homes instead?
Why do you bother to browse the internet, when you can get some of the i
aha (Score:1, Interesting)
Only problem is after it takes a sample (Score:5, Funny)
It will have to take another one an hour later.
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The samples will also be exported to the US on the cheap
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It will have to take another one an hour later.
You're showing your ignorance here, because that will only be the case if it takes heavily Americanized samples.
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I recommend "Radar Men from the Moon" with Commando Cody (Republic, some time in the 50's)
WTF Hoola Hoop? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why are they landing a "lander" on an elliptical orbit instead of the surface of the moon? Did this come from the Siri Translator?
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How did the Lunokhod rovers land?
It sounds like the Chinese are planning on imitating the Apollo landing orbit profiles.
IIRC, the CSM stayed in a 62 mile circular orbit, while the LM went into a 62x10 orbit. If everything was go, they'd do the landing burn at the 10 mile mark, otherwise, they'd return up to the CSM. The landing missions did the burn, Apollo 10 returned up to the CSM from the orbit.
Buy your own and try it for yourself! (Score:2)
A year or so ago I was perusing the made-in-china web site and found a page where you could buy a Long March missile booster and launching platform (included payload nacelle but no payload, bring your own fuel). The part I found most disconcerting was the little "add to basket" icon...
Re:Buy your own and try it for yourself! (Score:4, Funny)
Poor UPS guy. Imagine trying to get that up to the porch
Great... (Score:2)
Pretty soon they'll be setting up mines and factories, it will become as smoggy as Beijing, and everyone will have to wear masks to go outside.
How do RTGs work? (Score:3)
The Chang'E 3 lander will rely on a plutonium-238 radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG, for power. This is the same type of unit that's currently powering Curiosity's traverse across Mars. But unlike Curiosity, Chang'E 3 will only use its RTG to keep the spacecraft's systems humming during the two-week long lunar nights. Solar panels will allow the lander to take advantage of the free power during the two-week long lunar days.
I thought that once you put together an RTG, its lifespan was limited only by the radiation source and the degradation of the thermocouples.
So what's the purpose of not using the RTG all the time?
Will that extend its life?
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I wonder if the energy per pound is higher for a solar panel then for the RTG? If so it might make sense to have a high energy phase (solar and RTG) and a low energy phase (only RTG.) That would be my guess – anybody have a better idea?
Re:How do RTGs work? (Score:5, Informative)
All I can guess is that it doesn't provide enough power, and they are either powering down some components during the night or charging batteries during the day?
But I'm guessing without even reading the summary.
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"All I can guess is that it doesn't provide enough power, and they are either powering down some components during the night or charging batteries during the day?"
You are aware that a moon 'day' lasts 14 earth days? You couldn't get any work done.
PS. You can't land on the sun, not even at night.
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It looks like that's what they're doing though in some capacity, basically running most of it during the day on solar power, and then just using a small RTG to keep it warm enough that it doesn't freeze to death during the night, and possibly keep communications and stuff like that running.
Just because it's a machine doesn't necessarily mean that all of its components can survive -170C temperatures.
And even Curiosity doesn't do work at night, it uses a smaller RTG than needed to power all it's components, a
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Obviously since it was in the quote I replied to. Length of the night only makes it more likely they are doing what I said - powering down for the night due to not having enough juice. Not that I've read the summary yet of course.
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They don't always use thermocouples. Sometimes the energy capture is via Stirling generator: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_radioisotope_generator [wikipedia.org]
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They don't always use thermocouples. Sometimes the energy capture is via Stirling generator: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_radioisotope_generator [wikipedia.org]
Thanks for the link, I'm going to bookmark if for the next time one of my engineer friends makes a wisecrack about Stirling engines being "useless little toys."
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Lots of variables: mission profile, the mass of the RTG system, the mass of the panels, power requirements. What's most important? Keeping the weight down? Maybe something else. Let's say it's the weight though. Part of me imagines them setting up an equation involving the aforementioned variables and coming up with a solution that minimizes the weight.
If you go solar only, you would need bigger panels and batteries to run the dark side of the mission. If you go RTG only, you'd need a bigger RTG. No
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we can't go past Jupiter's orbit without it.
In the movie "Silent Running", they had ships with forests orbiting Saturn, and apparently getting sufficient sunlight there. Are you going to tell me that Hollywood didn't know what they were doing?
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Huh? Ok, it's been a few years since I've seen that movie, but I don't remember insufficient sunlight being a problem there; otherwise, why would they put the things way out in Saturn orbit anyway? (I always wondered why they thought that was a good idea, or if it was just so they could reuse the video sequence of going through Saturn's rings that they had shot for 2001 but never used.) I thought the whole problem was that the leaders on Earth didn't want to spend any more money maintaining these forest-
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The insufficient light problem was after he hijacked the ship and took it off its normal course/orientation. He set up additional lighting to compensate. It can be rationalized by concluding that most of the light the forests survived on was from artificial lighting with just a little supplemental light from the sun and that moving the ship dropped that supplemental light just below the required threshold. Or maybe movie makers just don't always fact-check very well.
As for blowing them up rather than just l
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Scuttling abandoned vessels, barges, whatever seems to be accepted practice as opposed to letting them drift around.
It is? I thought it was more normal to keep these things, and recycle them for scrap metal. There's a LOT of steel in a ship or barge. The exception seems to be military vessels, where standard practice seems to be to either put them in a ship graveyard ("mothballs"), like the one in the San Francisco bay, sell them to someone else, or for something where perhaps they don't want any secrets
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It is? I thought it was more normal to keep these things, and recycle them for scrap metal.
Sorry, should have been more clear. I meant in cases of abandonment. Because of a storm that makes it impractical to continue towing a barge or because the vessel doing the towing has been recalled for other duties. Also when a disaster such as a fire forces a vessel to be abandoned. True, that sort of thing is probably a lot less common these days when it's a lot easier to track and locate an abandoned vessel.
Agreed on the scuttling with a nuclear bomb. It doesn't make a lot of practical sense. Viewed as a
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RTG, not Fission. (Score:1)
"The Chang'E 3 lander will rely on a plutonium-238 radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or RTG, for power."
Taken from the 5th paragraph of the article.
This is NOT powered by a full blown nuclear reactor. Would it really hurt to make this clear in the post?
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RTG, not fission.
õ_Õ
This is NOT powered by a full blown nuclear reactor...
Correct. This is most likely why the article didn't claim that it is.
China's Rover Will Fail (Score:2, Funny)
Patrick McGoohan will eventually escape.
Yawn......... (Score:2)
The top is in (Score:1)
This is the kind sausage measuring contest that societies do at their peak.
Like the US, they will spend trill/bill/millions to take pictures of rocks in a vacuum then spend decades reminiscing about the good old days when they were launching rockets to the moon and beyond.
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Russions (Score:1)
Russions put "rovers" on the moon in the 60s and 70s. No one noticed cus we put men on the moon just before that.
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What the hell is a "Russion"?
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It's one ion of "Red Matter" (ref:ST)
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A thousand Brazilions.
I need closure on this anecdote! (Score:2)
Once settled, the 2,645 pound lander will...descend into a highly elliptical orbit 62 by 9.5 miles above the surface.
I assume it does something after that...
And are the Chinese going to be using miles and pounds while they mission-control this?
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Rare-Earth? (Score:2)
Let the Rare-Moon metals land-rush begin....
Helium-3 (Score:1)
Hmm Galactucus is Chinese (Score:1)
Metric ? (Score:1)
Could the text be in metric ? I find it annoying to go and convert x pounds of things in meters every time an article is added.
The days of cheap space flight ... (Score:2)
Once settled, the 2,645 pound lander will separate from the roughly 8,200 pound spacecraft and descend into a highly elliptical orbit 62 by 9.5 miles above the surface
2,645 GBP (4,225.29 USD)? That's bloody cheap, it used to cost millions.
Cheddar? (Score:2)
Finally, the faked moon landings will be shown for what they are and we can find out what kind of cheese the moon is really made of.
Been done before (Score:2)
The Russians launched a series of probes in the 70s (Luna 16, Luna 20 and Luna 24) that went to the moon and brought back samples.
Although I guess the novel thing this time is that it combines the Luna sample return missions with the Lunokhod rovers.
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Slashdot is moderated. Your submissions are reviewed by the moderator and accepted or rejected. You can go into your profile, view your submissions, and see which ones were accepted or rejected.
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You can go into your profile, view your submissions, and see which ones were accepted or rejected.
IF you can see them. I've posted a submission once and if I hadn't kept its URI, I would never have been able to return back to it, since the system pretended it had never existed.
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2017 (Score:3)
Info I gather from this link: http://www.cas.cn/zt/hyzt/16thysdh/zb/ [www.cas.cn]
and from this slide: http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetaryblog/8343205291/in/photostream [flickr.com]
Rough translation:
"From 2017 onward, after the completion of China's unmanned lunar missions, China will embark on manned missions to the moon and also to build a permanent lunar base"
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Or this could be just vapor, the Chinese goverment wanting some good press for a change...