9 ms·

China on Mars: Zhurong rover returns first pictures

243 points by leemailll 5y ago

mygoodaccount 5y ago
I expect this post won't garner the same attention here. I wonder why that might be.
- sho_hn 5y ago
  While I know what you mean (and it's true to some extent), I think the media strategy and of course lang sphere barrier are factors. With the American Mars landing it's a big live event with the landing time known down to the second in advance, designed to generate a lot of momentous excitement. The Chinese space programme tends to release information more sparingly and after the fact. I'd actually love to know more about this from a good English source (unfortunately I haven't taken the time to study Mandarin), really. Especially the engineering - it's been a while since we had two distinct tech stacks on the Red Planet, it'd be cool to compare and contrast.
  - Dah00n 5y ago
    The official site of CNSA is available in English: http://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/index.html http://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/index.html
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Part of that is because a lot of space activity in the West is competing for public funding and so you get a huge amount of publicity around any event to ensure that the public sees where its money goes. A plan economy doesn't really have that problem, publicity is an afterthought and if it has value that is more on the international stage (so when it is successful) then nationally, where it is welcome but not a necessity. So that's why you'll see the accent on success rather than on activity.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
Does anybody know how these are reported in chinese media? NASA makes a huge effort to publish their stuff in the western world and you don't hear much about china. Is it the opposite from inside China?
- simonh 5y ago
  They were very low key about it right up until it landed, then once they were sure it was ok they hit the domestic media pretty hard. Scenes of mission controllers hugging (somewhat awkwardly), group shots of the mission team with dramatic backdrop images, etc. I can understand they were concerned about the risk of a problem, landing anything on Mars is hard. ESA has failed twice now, and historically about half of all missions to Mars have crapped out. It's a genuinely impressive achievement, for all the sour grapes about stealing US tech, actually implementing this stuff and following through like this is no cakewalk. I suspect this will be pointed to as the moment China pulled ahead of Russia in space technology. Yes Russia has more achievements under it's belt, but most of that was over a generation ago. In terms of current capabilities I think this is really significant.
- Dah00n 5y ago
  I don't think you can get an unbiased reply on this topic on HN unfortunately (or any other SoMe site). You can look at CNSA.gov.cn yourself though and make up your own mind :) English site: http://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/index.html http://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/index.html
  - HDMI_Cable 5y ago
    > (or any other SoMe site) What does SoMe mean?
    - the-dude 5y ago
      My guess : Social Media.
      - spicyramen 5y ago
coldcode 5y ago
What is the map projection called in that map from NASA?
- tantalor 5y ago
  It basically looks like equirectangular and modified with pointy poles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equirectangular_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equirectangular_projection Maybe it is just regular equirectangular but the lines are drawn weird.
- DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
  It's a completely standard Cartesian projection (x = longitude, y = latitude), but with nonsense graticules plotted on top. I think BBC took a NASA image of Mars and added their own graticules and landing-site labels. Compare the BBC image with these two NASA images: * BBC: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/825B/production/_118517333_mars_map_missions_640_2x_v2-nc.png https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/825B/production/... * NASA base map of Mars: https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/uploads/filer_public_thumbnails/filer_public/9e/62/9e629da7-90e2-48f8-a0e4-f573b3e107ff/exomars_landing_sites_in_context.jpg__1240x510_q85_crop_subject_location-620%2C254_subsampling-2.jpg https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/uploads/filer_public_thumbnail... * NASA landing sites: https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/24729/map-of-nasas-mars-landing-sites/?site=msl https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/24729/map-of-nasas-mars-land...
- OmicronCeti 5y ago
  It looks like the equirectangular Mars projection. Details can be found on the HiRISE or THEMIS sites.
ch4s3 5y ago
Good for them. It's great to see space exploration picking up outside of our efforts in the US. I would be great if we could cooperate more upfront, but the more people around the world that know how to land a payload on another planet the better. That kind of applied science and engineering is really valuable.
- seniorivn 5y ago
  competition is great, but it's a shame that space became primarily a warfare competition(chinese space programm is 100% army project) Hopefully there is a chance, space will become a space for commercial and other civil kind of competition, when we start to mine asteroids
BelenusMordred 5y ago
Another pic: https://imgur.com/Vct0PXV https://imgur.com/Vct0PXV It's an interesting design, in someways the ramp is a deceptively simple concept but I'm not sure if it's safer than the US approach. Some other neat things are: Solar panels, they are a specially designed to electrically repel Martian dust, in theory there should be a decent power gain from this and it will likely be used in future missions. While other rovers fortuitously found solar was self cleaning on Mars, power is still a knife-edge engineering problem for rovers. Ground penetrating radar, can see down 100m, a lot further than anyone else has ever investigated, should yield some interesting data. Like most other missions they are very interested in prior and current water on the planet. Coverage, they are planning a few hundred metres over 3 months, the rover itself can do 200m in a day though if needed, very unlikely that will happen but it is in a flat area of Mars. The landing zone was so huge that there'll be some tough choices about what is the most productive area to explore for planetary science. The speed of entry, Zhurong came in at about half the speed of Perseverance, this makes life a lot easier. It takes a lot longer to bleed off that velocity in orbit but seems like other nations attempting a landing will follow this path. I'd be interested to know about their uplink, remember hearing they might be using an ESA orbiter but not sure about that, the orbiter they have is not that great for a connection due to it's altitude. Technical info is surprisingly hard to find, even in publications like nature or science mags normally focused more on the details.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  I don't think the technical data being hard to find is that surprising. China has a pattern of not talking about their space missions unless they go well. Since they control their press the party only ever gets good press. It's also worth noting that the CNSA is not a civilian agency like NASA or the ESA. It's a military agency and treats programs as if they're secret military projects.
  - qiqing 5y ago
    Here's a video from Chinese TV in Feb before the landing that someone else posted in this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBhVaihkDvc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBhVaihkDvc I realize it doesn't have English subtitles, so I'll summarize some highlights of what's in there: * interviews with scientists and engineers working on the project * trajectory of the spacecraft and lots of talk about the challenges of reducing velocity for landing * historical overview and context for why Mars exploration is important for science * what to expect in the future landing and when it'll happen It's pretty similar to video programs that NASA produces. Not sure what information you're expecting that isn't out there, but I think you're attributing to secrecy what is more easily attributable to people not translating open public reports into English.
danielvf 5y ago
Although the US rover program has made Mars look easy, it's been fiendishly failure prone for other space agencys Outside of one Russian lander working for 120 seconds after touchdown before failing, no nation outside the US has ever gotten a lander to work on Mars before. Have a look at the list of mars missions and see just how many failures there are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars
- Shadonototro 5y ago
  joint effort with the the ESA (European Space Agency), let's not forget that http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/04/Perseverance_rover http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/04/Perseveranc...
mlacks 5y ago
Has there been any discussion on "nations" on mars? I just always assumed Mars would have colonies like ISS spread around. I wonder if anyone is planning on marking territory
- bryananderson 5y ago
  The Outer Space Treaty prohibits the claiming of territory in space or on other planetary bodies. This treaty is signed by all of the major spacefaring states. If states begin to extract resources or establish permanent habitation beyond scientific expeditions such as the ISS, the terms of this treaty will not be tenable. There is no magic solution to prevent states from being self-interested and claiming resources for themselves, but hopefully the resolution will be a new treaty which provides a framework for peaceful, fair, and sustainable development of space. Some self-enrichment can be allowed while also ensuring that some of the benefits flow to all of humanity. The alternative, if no such agreement can be reached between the spacefaring powers, is a free-for-all in which states withdraw from the OST and do whatever they want. This seems likely to lead to monopolization of the solar system’s resources by a few states. It also seems likely to lead to confrontation between the spacefaring powers.
  - mc32 5y ago
    they may need a treaty to resolve issues between private companies as well and not only nations give we are seeing more private enterprise enter spa(ce)tial frontier.
    - bryananderson 5y ago
      Space treaties (like sea treaties) consider states to be the parties to the treaty, and states are responsible for ensuring compliance from their private companies. Private companies are not directly party to the treaty. So, for example, if a treaty requires the United States to do something (such as avoid using a certain type of resource), the United States is responsible for making US companies (like SpaceX or ULA or whoever) comply. Again, this comes from the sea law tradition: private ships at sea must be registered in some state, which is responsible for ensuring compliance with the international laws to which that state is party.
aphextron 5y ago
I thought this looked familiar https://youtu.be/0L01FxuRBZY?t=11 https://youtu.be/0L01FxuRBZY?t=11
lpasselin 5y ago
Is there a lot of cooperation between the NASA rover team and the Chinese?
- yrlihuan 5y ago
  "Since 2011, the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has excluded the Chinese government and China-affiliated organisations from its activities, including using funds to host Chinese visitors at NASA facilities."
- OmicronCeti 5y ago
  No. Many aspect of NASA's work is highly controlled under ITAR. I used to have to be debriefed after ANY foreign travel because other people in my lab used image processing software that was covered under ITAR...

243 points by leemailll 5y ago

mygoodaccount 5y ago

I expect this post won't garner the same attention here. I wonder why that might be.

sho_hn 5y ago
While I know what you mean (and it's true to some extent), I think the media strategy and of course lang sphere barrier are factors. With the American Mars landing it's a big live event with the landing time known down to the second in advance, designed to generate a lot of momentous excitement. The Chinese space programme tends to release information more sparingly and after the fact. I'd actually love to know more about this from a good English source (unfortunately I haven't taken the time to study Mandarin), really. Especially the engineering - it's been a while since we had two distinct tech stacks on the Red Planet, it'd be cool to compare and contrast.
- Dah00n 5y ago
  The official site of CNSA is available in English: http://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/index.html http://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/index.html
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Part of that is because a lot of space activity in the West is competing for public funding and so you get a huge amount of publicity around any event to ensure that the public sees where its money goes. A plan economy doesn't really have that problem, publicity is an afterthought and if it has value that is more on the international stage (so when it is successful) then nationally, where it is welcome but not a necessity. So that's why you'll see the accent on success rather than on activity.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

Does anybody know how these are reported in chinese media? NASA makes a huge effort to publish their stuff in the western world and you don't hear much about china. Is it the opposite from inside China?

simonh 5y ago
They were very low key about it right up until it landed, then once they were sure it was ok they hit the domestic media pretty hard. Scenes of mission controllers hugging (somewhat awkwardly), group shots of the mission team with dramatic backdrop images, etc. I can understand they were concerned about the risk of a problem, landing anything on Mars is hard. ESA has failed twice now, and historically about half of all missions to Mars have crapped out. It's a genuinely impressive achievement, for all the sour grapes about stealing US tech, actually implementing this stuff and following through like this is no cakewalk. I suspect this will be pointed to as the moment China pulled ahead of Russia in space technology. Yes Russia has more achievements under it's belt, but most of that was over a generation ago. In terms of current capabilities I think this is really significant.
Dah00n 5y ago
I don't think you can get an unbiased reply on this topic on HN unfortunately (or any other SoMe site). You can look at CNSA.gov.cn yourself though and make up your own mind :) English site: http://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/index.html http://www.cnsa.gov.cn/english/index.html
- HDMI_Cable 5y ago
  > (or any other SoMe site) What does SoMe mean?
  - the-dude 5y ago
    My guess : Social Media.
    - spicyramen 5y ago

coldcode 5y ago

What is the map projection called in that map from NASA?

tantalor 5y ago
It basically looks like equirectangular and modified with pointy poles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equirectangular_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equirectangular_projection Maybe it is just regular equirectangular but the lines are drawn weird.
DiogenesKynikos 5y ago
It's a completely standard Cartesian projection (x = longitude, y = latitude), but with nonsense graticules plotted on top. I think BBC took a NASA image of Mars and added their own graticules and landing-site labels. Compare the BBC image with these two NASA images: * BBC: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/825B/production/_118517333_mars_map_missions_640_2x_v2-nc.png https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/825B/production/... * NASA base map of Mars: https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/uploads/filer_public_thumbnails/filer_public/9e/62/9e629da7-90e2-48f8-a0e4-f573b3e107ff/exomars_landing_sites_in_context.jpg__1240x510_q85_crop_subject_location-620%2C254_subsampling-2.jpg https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/uploads/filer_public_thumbnail... * NASA landing sites: https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/24729/map-of-nasas-mars-landing-sites/?site=msl https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/24729/map-of-nasas-mars-land...
OmicronCeti 5y ago
It looks like the equirectangular Mars projection. Details can be found on the HiRISE or THEMIS sites.

ch4s3 5y ago

Good for them. It's great to see space exploration picking up outside of our efforts in the US. I would be great if we could cooperate more upfront, but the more people around the world that know how to land a payload on another planet the better. That kind of applied science and engineering is really valuable.

seniorivn 5y ago
competition is great, but it's a shame that space became primarily a warfare competition(chinese space programm is 100% army project) Hopefully there is a chance, space will become a space for commercial and other civil kind of competition, when we start to mine asteroids

BelenusMordred 5y ago

Another pic: https://imgur.com/Vct0PXV https://imgur.com/Vct0PXV It's an interesting design, in someways the ramp is a deceptively simple concept but I'm not sure if it's safer than the US approach. Some other neat things are: Solar panels, they are a specially designed to electrically repel Martian dust, in theory there should be a decent power gain from this and it will likely be used in future missions. While other rovers fortuitously found solar was self cleaning on Mars, power is still a knife-edge engineering problem for rovers. Ground penetrating radar, can see down 100m, a lot further than anyone else has ever investigated, should yield some interesting data. Like most other missions they are very interested in prior and current water on the planet. Coverage, they are planning a few hundred metres over 3 months, the rover itself can do 200m in a day though if needed, very unlikely that will happen but it is in a flat area of Mars. The landing zone was so huge that there'll be some tough choices about what is the most productive area to explore for planetary science. The speed of entry, Zhurong came in at about half the speed of Perseverance, this makes life a lot easier. It takes a lot longer to bleed off that velocity in orbit but seems like other nations attempting a landing will follow this path. I'd be interested to know about their uplink, remember hearing they might be using an ESA orbiter but not sure about that, the orbiter they have is not that great for a connection due to it's altitude. Technical info is surprisingly hard to find, even in publications like nature or science mags normally focused more on the details.

giantrobot 5y ago
I don't think the technical data being hard to find is that surprising. China has a pattern of not talking about their space missions unless they go well. Since they control their press the party only ever gets good press. It's also worth noting that the CNSA is not a civilian agency like NASA or the ESA. It's a military agency and treats programs as if they're secret military projects.
- qiqing 5y ago
  Here's a video from Chinese TV in Feb before the landing that someone else posted in this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBhVaihkDvc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBhVaihkDvc I realize it doesn't have English subtitles, so I'll summarize some highlights of what's in there: * interviews with scientists and engineers working on the project * trajectory of the spacecraft and lots of talk about the challenges of reducing velocity for landing * historical overview and context for why Mars exploration is important for science * what to expect in the future landing and when it'll happen It's pretty similar to video programs that NASA produces. Not sure what information you're expecting that isn't out there, but I think you're attributing to secrecy what is more easily attributable to people not translating open public reports into English.

danielvf 5y ago

Although the US rover program has made Mars look easy, it's been fiendishly failure prone for other space agencys Outside of one Russian lander working for 120 seconds after touchdown before failing, no nation outside the US has ever gotten a lander to work on Mars before. Have a look at the list of mars missions and see just how many failures there are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_missions_to_Mars

Shadonototro 5y ago
joint effort with the the ESA (European Space Agency), let's not forget that http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/04/Perseverance_rover http://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2020/04/Perseveranc...

mlacks 5y ago

Has there been any discussion on "nations" on mars? I just always assumed Mars would have colonies like ISS spread around. I wonder if anyone is planning on marking territory

bryananderson 5y ago
The Outer Space Treaty prohibits the claiming of territory in space or on other planetary bodies. This treaty is signed by all of the major spacefaring states. If states begin to extract resources or establish permanent habitation beyond scientific expeditions such as the ISS, the terms of this treaty will not be tenable. There is no magic solution to prevent states from being self-interested and claiming resources for themselves, but hopefully the resolution will be a new treaty which provides a framework for peaceful, fair, and sustainable development of space. Some self-enrichment can be allowed while also ensuring that some of the benefits flow to all of humanity. The alternative, if no such agreement can be reached between the spacefaring powers, is a free-for-all in which states withdraw from the OST and do whatever they want. This seems likely to lead to monopolization of the solar system’s resources by a few states. It also seems likely to lead to confrontation between the spacefaring powers.
- mc32 5y ago
  they may need a treaty to resolve issues between private companies as well and not only nations give we are seeing more private enterprise enter spa(ce)tial frontier.
  - bryananderson 5y ago
    Space treaties (like sea treaties) consider states to be the parties to the treaty, and states are responsible for ensuring compliance from their private companies. Private companies are not directly party to the treaty. So, for example, if a treaty requires the United States to do something (such as avoid using a certain type of resource), the United States is responsible for making US companies (like SpaceX or ULA or whoever) comply. Again, this comes from the sea law tradition: private ships at sea must be registered in some state, which is responsible for ensuring compliance with the international laws to which that state is party.

aphextron 5y ago

I thought this looked familiar https://youtu.be/0L01FxuRBZY?t=11 https://youtu.be/0L01FxuRBZY?t=11

lpasselin 5y ago

Is there a lot of cooperation between the NASA rover team and the Chinese?

yrlihuan 5y ago
"Since 2011, the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has excluded the Chinese government and China-affiliated organisations from its activities, including using funds to host Chinese visitors at NASA facilities."
OmicronCeti 5y ago
No. Many aspect of NASA's work is highly controlled under ITAR. I used to have to be debriefed after ANY foreign travel because other people in my lab used image processing software that was covered under ITAR...