The Chinese Mars probe Tianwen-1 successfully detached a lander bearing the rover named Zhurong to soft land on Utopia Planitia, inside Mars’ northern lowlands.   This makes China the third country to successfully soft land a probe on Mars, the second to land a rover on Mars, but the first to successfully do either on its very first try.

As yet, the rover is still sitting on the lander.  Whether the rover will successful drive itself off the lander onto Martian surface and start roving is yet to be seen.

Good.

Neither the governments of China, The USA or the former Soviet Union have any real vision when it comes to space exploration. But they have plenty of vision when it comes to being upstaged by their rivals - especially the USA.

China soft lands a probe on Mars.

(May 15, 2021 at 12:19 am)AFTT47 Wrote: Good.

Neither the governments of China, The USA or the former Soviet Union have any real vision when it comes to space exploration. But they have plenty of vision when it comes to being upstaged by their rivals - especially the USA.

That is not entirely fair.   For much of last 30 years, NASA faced no serious danger of being upstaged by anyone in Mars exploration, yet it did persevere with a more or less systematic program of surface and orbital robotic exploration of Mars with numerous orbital and lander missions

Although the Chinese did just crash the party, they gave no indication of pursuing a systematic Mars exploration program beyond Tianwen-1 and have announced no additional orbital or surface Mars missions, while NASA has a string of additional missions lined up through the 2020s.

The orbital astronomy observatory program of NASA, whose flagship is the Hubble Space Telescope, also systematically covered the spectrum with Compton gamma Ray orbital telescope, Chandra X-Ray orbital telescope, Spitzer infra-red telescope, Kepler exoplanet telescope, despite facing no serious danger of being upstaged until recently.   It’s next step is the James Webb telescope scheduled to be launched later this year being its next flagship.

The Chinese announced their own Hubble equivalent to crash this party too in 2024.   Their scope is expected to match Hubble’s resolution, but upstage it by being able to cover 300 times more sky with each shot compared to Hubble.   This give it capability to image the entire sky over its expected life, something neither Hubble nor JW can come close to doing.   But that is also china’s sole announced foray into high end orbital astronomical observatory.  There is no other announced observatory to round out any systematic program of science.

There is also NASA’s outer solar system exploration program that featured an entire fleet of probes to explore different aspects of the outer solar system.     The Chinese also announced plans to crash this party in their characteristic way, by launching a pair of probes around 2025 to explore the heliopause and then exit the solar system in 25 years, faster than any previous probe, but this is again not accompanied by any follow up road map for additional systematic scientific missions.

So it does seem the NASA program has systematic expansion of planetary and astronomic science high in lost of priorities, while the Chinese program is focused on showing China can match America’s signal gadgets in space based planetary and astronomy science, but there is no follow up aimed to match the American programs’ actual scientific output.

good good

At work.

"No-one would have believed, in the freshing cycles of the brilig phase, that Martian affairs were being watched from the timless worlds of space."

"No-one could have cogitated that we were being scrytinized as a sophont with a micro - lens studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of hydrate."

"Few Martian's even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably more rapacious to ours regarded this red sphere with envious orbs."

And slowly and surely, they threw their probes against us.

I'm waiting for sentient life on Mars to file suit on the US and China for littering. The Viking lander dumped noxious chemicals into the soil. There will be hell to pay! 

(May 14, 2021 at 11:36 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote: The Chinese Mars probe Tianwen-1 successfully detached a lander bearing the rover named Zhurong to soft land on Utopia Planitia, inside Mars’ northern lowlands.   This makes China the third country to successfully soft land a probe on Mars, the second to land a rover on Mars, but the first to successfully do either on its very first try.

As yet, the rover is still sitting on the lander.  Whether the rover will successful drive itself off the lander onto Martian surface and start roving is yet to be seen.

Pretty impressive. Don't you mean the first landing about which China has told us? How many failures have they had, and is this actually the first?

I seem to have read somewhere, about another totalitarian government in the space race. I of course refer to the USSR. It seems they sent several craft up with animals before success. Also Yuri Gagarin was in fact the first Soviet Cosmonaut to survive.

Be fascinated to learn such state secrets about North Korea. It'll probably come out at some point, but probably not within my lifetime.

It's fake, just like the moonlanding.

(October 27, 2021 at 6:41 pm)Oldandeasilyconfused Wrote:

(May 14, 2021 at 11:36 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote: The Chinese Mars probe Tianwen-1 successfully detached a lander bearing the rover named Zhurong to soft land on Utopia Planitia, inside Mars’ northern lowlands.   This makes China the third country to successfully soft land a probe on Mars, the second to land a rover on Mars, but the first to successfully do either on its very first try.

As yet, the rover is still sitting on the lander.  Whether the rover will successful drive itself off the lander onto Martian surface and start roving is yet to be seen.

Pretty impressive. Don't you mean the first landing about which China has told us? How many failures have they had, and is this actually the first?

I seem to have read somewhere, about another totalitarian government in the space race. I of course refer to the USSR. It seems they sent several craft up with animals before success. Also Yuri Gagarin was in fact the first Soviet Cosmonaut to survive.

Be fascinated to learn such state secrets about North Korea. It'll probably come out at some point, but probably not within my lifetime.

Actually, each of china’s manned, lunar or deep space missions during the last 20 years were announced years in advance.    For them to have hidden previous failed missions, they would have to have known the mission was going to fail during the planning stage, decided to hide the upcoming failure long in advance, and then launched it to its doom anyway.   

This particular mission was televised near live from launch to touch down.  It showed no indication of any preparedness to hide a failure.    Over the last 30 years, the Chinese have also announced most of the launch and mission failures, although they were not always forthcoming about the reasons for the failure. 

It is true Yuri Gagarin was the first cosmonaut to survive.   But that was because he was the first to fly, so no cosmonaut had previously had a chance to either survive or die on a mission.   And none would die on a mission for another 6 years.