China's Jade Rabbit Fights To Come Back From the Dead 76
Despite being declared officially lost, the Chinese moon rover may yet have some life left. Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "CNN reports that reports of Jade Rabbit's demise may have been premature as signs are emerging that China's first lunar rover may be up and running again. Following technical malfunctions Xinhua says that the lunar rover had lost communication with mission control but on Thursday the state news agency said that the rover was "fully awake" and had returned to its normal signal-receiving status. "Jade Rabbit has fully resurrected and is able to receive signals, but still suffers a mechanical control abnormality," says China's lunar program spokesman Pei Zhaoyu. "The rover entered hibernation while in an abnormal state. We were worried it wouldn't be able to make it through the extreme cold of the lunar night. But it came back alive. The rover stands a chance of being saved as it is still alive." The lunar rover's end seemed near when it signed off at the end of January with a poignant message: "Goodnight humanity." Yutu, as the device is known in Mandarin, had been out of action for two weeks following a technical malfunction, and media around the world filed its obituary late on Wednesday after a short statement on Chinese state media alerted the world to its apparent terminal failings. Should Jade Rabbit make a full recovery, it would cap another success for space exploration, which has seen NASA's Opportunity Mars rover, currently exploring the red planet, far outlast its expected lifespan."
It took Chinese New Years off (Score:5, Funny)
and was recovering from all the partying and travel back to the Moon.
(Seriously, great news!)
Re:It took Chinese New Years off (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously, great news!
My congratulations too. Great to hear that they can continue the project.
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Or just that the sun is heating it up enough to revive from the cold. Not sure how many cold/warm cycles it would be able to survive in the crippled state.
Hope they learn something from it.
Not like everyone else that commented badly here have their first rev hardware/software of any level of real complexities works perfectly in real life. May the person with no sins cast the first stone.
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Opposed to components made where? We don't any more. South eastern asia's slave labor camps? Seriously, it would have been smarter you just curse beta at this point.
Re: Serves them right (Score:4, Informative)
Thing about China is that their primary focus (permeates all of their culture) is to maintain high appearances even if everything underneath is complete crap. A good anecdote and analogy for this are their prize schools, which from the outside look like something you'd find in Abu Dhabi, but inside are literally falling apart and are a safety hazard to students.
With that in mind, if the Chinese are saying it is 'awake' with control abnormalities, I'd guess in reality it is about 5x worse than they claim.
Re: Serves them right (Score:5, Informative)
China's still saying it's dead; it's amateur radio enthusiasts who have detected its broadcast.
Re: Serves them right (Score:4, Interesting)
To be exact, they're saying it's in exactly the same malfunctioning state it was before the lunar winter.
Re: Serves them right (Score:4, Informative)
Thing about China is that their primary focus (permeates all of their culture) is to maintain high appearances even if everything underneath is complete crap.
Actually China is happy to manufacture whatever the market wants. Do you want cheap and dangerous electronics which spew RFI and may burst into flames? You got it. Do you want excellent optical components for high-end telescopes? You got that too!
The only question is what level of quality control and oversight you're willing to pay for. I've had circuit boards manufactured in china which almost fell apart when I got them. Holes weren't centred, silkscreen was patchy, and the solder mask was a mess. I've also had an 8 layer board manufactured complete with gold plating and custom materials for the RF path which came out perfect, it also cost 100x the price of the cheap one.
You can get cheap plastic computers from China that may or may not boot up. Or you can get Apple Macs made in China.
What are you willing to pay for?
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Actually China is happy to manufacture whatever the market wants.
Yep, I'm sure we had companies wanting poisonous baby formula, lead paint, and dog food imported. Markets don't get what they want and are willing to pay for from China, they seem to get whatever China can get away with passing off.
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Yep, I'm sure we had companies wanting poisonous baby formula, lead paint, and dog food imported. Markets don't get what they want and are willing to pay for from China, they seem to get whatever China can get away with passing off.
That's nothing to do with China and everything to do with quality control. If you go to China and say I want a widget and make sure it's red, they don't know you have something against lead paint. If you go to China and say I want a widget and make it red, and make it meet the Australian standards ASxxxx and ASxxxx, and meet the following toxicity requirements, then you will get a different product and charged accordingly.
Or are you suggesting if I come to you to buy a "piece of metal" I automatically get s
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Thing about China is that their primary focus (permeates all of their culture) is to maintain high appearances even if everything underneath is complete crap.
Hence the iphone.
Re:Serves them right (Score:5, Funny)
The China National Space Administration has already announced they will no longer be sourcing components via Alibaba or eBay.
Re:Serves them right (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Serves them right (Score:4, Informative)
Chinese have the skill to make both cheap crap and premium components. It's really only about the targeted price point and what the customer orders.
Except when the customer orders premium components, they produce a few to prove they can do it, then deliver cheap crap.
Apparently Aston-Martin are having to recall most of their recent cars because they ordered premium components from China and... didn't get them.
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So you got one case. Now explain high end telescope optics, high end computer products, and the many other auto components which have no problem which also come from China.
I think you've been watching too much Batman.
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Have you ever worked in manufacturing?
Back in the early 80's I visited the "inward goods" department of Plessey Telecoms Edge Lane plant (building then "state of the art(*)" electonic telephone exchanges).
Random samples of every incoming batch of components were tested. fairly regularly whole batches were rejected. the suppliers were in Germany, Italy, the USA, Japan...
As the great Ronald said: Trust but verify.
These days people would rather just lawyer up.
((*) ok, not as good as the Ericsson AXE exchange
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It's really sad that consumers here have been convinced by retailers that price is everything, Much of the rest of the world still remembers that it is often worth more over the long run to pay more for a better product, but here a blender that is two bucks cheaper will far outsell the more solidly-built one next to it on the shelf.
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I see the opposite, that people think "free" means "worthless". I see people paying ten bucks for a cup of coffee because it's Starbucks. I see people buying bottled water. I see people paying two dollars for a can of corn when there are store brands of corn grown in the same field and canned in the same factory for sixty nine cents. I see people buying Tylenol and Alieve when the generics are chemically identical and a third the price.
Really, I can make a call or a text or an email or take a picture or vid
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What is this magical phone without delicate glass on the touchscreen? I want one.
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Apparently almost anything except an iPhone. I've only broken a single screen, and that was a cheap throwaway phone I slipped in the ice and fell on. But my daughter's an iPhone user and breaks all of them. I've seen other iPhones with cracked screens, but no other brands..
I suspect Apple uses thinner glass to make the whole phone thinner. I know of no other phone so delicate.
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N900.
It's delicate plastic, not delicate glass.
Maybe not the answer you were hoping for.
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I agree that a Lexus is an overpriced Toyota... But it's still a Toyota and Toyota air-conditioners are built with two settings, off and Igloo.
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Yet another reason for me to like mine better. Dial in the temperature you want and that's the temperature you get, summer or winter. In the summer mine starts kicking out cold air quickly (takes a minute to cool the pipes).
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The Toyota (aka Lexus) was designed to last for half a million miles or more. The Chrysler was designed to fall apart after a hundred thousand. Literally. My great uncle retired from the Chrysler Proving Grounds, one of their jobs was to visit wrecking yards, find Chrysler products with >100,000 miles, and examine all the parts. If (for example) the starter and steering linkage were still in fine shape while everything else was uniformly worn management would go after the manufacturers of those parts
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Odd, mine has 160,000 miles and I've used it hard. All I've had to replace were some steering parts when I had it aligned last year (besides tires, oil, wiper refills, etc). I guess I got lucky.
Either way, it's foolish to pay a premium for an item to last twenty years when you're going to trade it in in three.
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Price is a lot.
First, you have to amortise the cost of the item over its lifespan. That blender that is two bucks cheaper may last just as long as the solidly-built one, especially if I only have light-duty uses for a blender. Or the TV I bought a week ago for $200 has a planned lifespan of no more than about 5 years by which time I hope to have a plan for a better, complete entertainment system - so there's no point in buying a $500 TV that's going to get replaced in 5 years anyway. Or the car that cost
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The problem is that it is very difficult for the average consumer (or even techie) to tell when something is high quality and hence worth more. I have found that most of the time, the cheap stuff is adequate. If I want quality, I have to spend a lot of time researching. Sometimes you can trust brands to produce quality stuff and to stand behind it if it breaks. Other times, not so much, and the task is complicated by counterfeits.
A recent example... I wanted to buy a few standard 18650 lithium rechargeable
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Except it's not usually 2 bucks. It's usually something like 19.99 or 349.99
Obligatory (Score:1)
I for one , welcome, Our Lunar Robotic Zombie Overlord!
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Hrumph. Kids today. This subject calls for a Monty Python "I feel better...I think I'll go for a walk..." joke. The overlord style joke was more appropriate when it landed.
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That's what they want you to believe (Score:2, Funny)
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More likely a party official gifted the lunar lander to his 10yo son for his birthday and has now been disciplined.
Less than a day after the original story was submitted to slashdot, the craft is returned to the fake landing site in the desert.
Too bad they didn't launch it this year... (Score:1)
Then we could go on about whipping a Dead Horse.
Can we please stop anthropomorphising rovers? (Score:5, Funny)
it signed off at the end of January with a poignant message: "Goodnight humanity."
No it didn't. Some guy in a press office wrote it.
Can we please stop anthropomorphising rovers? They hate that.
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Except for the part where the rover is actually programmed to emit messages like that...granted, it seems a bit dopey and a waste of man-hours to me, but hey.
http://science.slashdot.org/st... [slashdot.org]
Amen (XKCD) (Score:4, Interesting)
Am I the only one? (Score:2)
Who thinks that "Jade Rabbit" sounds like it should be the name of a sex toy?
Re:Am I the only one? (Score:4, Informative)
It actually is. As noted by John Stewart in his humorous relay of the previous "death of the lunar sex toy" news.
moon poachers (Score:2)
Cover up the embarrassment (Score:4, Insightful)
This sounds more like a phony story ordered by Party elites to cover up the embarrassment of failure. They can just pretend it started working again (with the camera mysteriously failing) and save face with bogus tweets and press releases.
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Sadly, this is the first thing I thought, too. I hope that it is working again, though.
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Sadly, this is the first thing I thought, too. I hope that it is working again, though.
It's not out of the question that it could wake up. If they still have power and the boards are reasonably intact a timed reboot should be achievable. Having functional devices--sensors, actuators, communications, or whatever they have, would be more of a challenge. Or yeah, a fake story is always a possibility.. I'm sure they would have some of their best engineers on the team, so I wouldn't count them out yet, or so I would like to believe.
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If you made a phony story would you publish a tweet showing a picture of the RF being received including the exact frequencies it's happening on so any ham could independently verify the findings?
It may be bogus, but common this isn't North Korea we're talking about. The Chinese government is a bit smarter than that.
It was only mostly dead (Score:5, Funny)
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Mostly dead is a little bit alive. A little bit alive they can work with.
But does it have a wheelbarrow? That would be something.
Not quite dead yet (Score:4, Funny)
Jade Rabbit: "Uh, I'm-I'm not quite dead, sir."
Mission Control: "Well, you shall not have been mortally wounded in vain!"
Jade Rabbit: "Uh, I-I think uh, I could pull through, sir."
Mission Control: "Oh, I see."
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Bravo.
A trojan rabbit joke would also have been appropriate.
Not so much lost (Score:3)
Just needed a fsck and it was then in /lost+found
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Just needed a fsck and it was then in /lost+found
That would be great except this is Windows 98 and somebody sent the format C:/ command....Anybody have a boot disk and a long arm?
Better headline... (Score:2)
"Zombie Rabbit On The Moon!" :p
rover life span (Score:1)
I am tired of reading about how the Mars rovers miraculously lived so long.
It should be obvious to even the dumbest among us that the short "expected lifespan" of the rovers was just some contractual trigger for some bonus for some contractor and was in no way a design goal.
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Incorrect. It must just pain you when things go well simply do to good design.
Even if you were correct, you are not, it would Still Be a Design Goal to get there.
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I am tired of reading about how the Mars rovers miraculously lived so long.
It should be obvious to even the dumbest among us that the short "expected lifespan" of the rovers was just some contractual trigger for some bonus for some contractor and was in no way a design goal.
You are right, it was a design criteria, a requirement etc. 90 days was the warranty period, the contracted minimum lifespan required for the rovers and the absolute minimum design criteria for the entire system. It simply MUST work 100% for 90 days. I'm sure the "goal" was much longer. I'm just guessing, but had either of the rovers failed within the 90 days a sizable final payment would not have been made.
But, I'm not so tired of hearing that the rovers both have lasted more than the warranty. It is a
I don't know if the title is a very cleaver pun (Score:2)
or the writer got lucky.
Bad analogy (Score:2)
Should Jade Rabbit make a full recovery, it would cap another success for space exploration, which has seen NASA's Opportunity Mars rover, currently exploring the red planet, far outlast its expected lifespan."
Opportunity far outlived its projected 90 day operational lifetime. Jade Rabbit was supposed to go 3 months and has already gone belly-up just a month into it.
Reminds me of the Voyager thing (Score:1)
Death of Slashdot (Score:2)
We all asked for it. We bitched and moaned. We wanted Slashdot to deliver stories faster, and we mocked it when it published yesterdays news.
The one time Slashdot listens to its users and it published a story so fast that it was wrong, and was debunked only hours later.
Good to see the little wabbit is still fighting on.
Eeek (Score:2)
It was probably on the dark side of the moon looking for Transformers...