China says its first Mars rover Zhurong has landed on the Red Planet China's Zhurong rover today touched down on Mars from the Tianwen-1 orbiter, the nation's state media says. We're told the machine will take carry out self-tests, and try to move itself to explore the Red Planet's surface. "On May 15, our country’s first Mars exploration mission, Tianwen-1, landed in a pre-selected landing …
"China's first Mars rover Zhurong will try to land on Red Planet in one piece today"
Story posted at 2237UTC, about a landing to be attempted at 1113UTC "today". Have the Chinese or El Reg mastered time travel?
And yes, I know I am being picky posting about a minor editorial temporal discrepancy when the real story is that human beings are landing [another] robot on another planet! Go earthlings!
Maybe. I see this as China copying what is perceived as engineering excellence. Whether the project is actually any good and produces good science we probably will never know.
Yes this isn't easy but its a whole lot easier after someone else has done it a few times and you can get a look at their plans.
My Tsingtao is still in the fridge.
> Whether the project is actually any good and produces good science we probably will never know
It isn't that important either: Even if they are just flexing their technological muscle this time, it is still a step forward towards space exploration, and "the more the merrier", as they say.
...And at 13:14 mean local time at the site. (Yes, there is a convention for local time on Mars. I gather some of the folks working on Mars missions have had watches so they'd know when the rovers would be in daylight. No time zones of which I'm aware, though the crater Airy has been designated as being at the Martian prime meridian.)
This gave me a chance to exercise my C code to compute Mars times.
The reach of 5G is infinite. BTW, recent research I found on the internet shows that 5G is amplified by the microchips in COVID vaccines.
(Other research from the web shows that Mars is probably nothing more than an illusion generated by 5G and the 5G has been around longer than most people think. Since biblical times at least. Maybe longer.)
vtconger, Hi,
The reach of 5G is infinite. BTW, recent research I found on the internet shows that 5G is amplified by the microchips in COVID vaccines.(Other research from the web shows that Mars is probably nothing more than an illusion generated by 5G and the 5G has been around longer than most people think. Since biblical times at least. Maybe longer.) .... vtcodger
Is it possibly an Affiliate of Holy Grails, and a SMARTR Variety Variant of the Infection?
The posit here being that it certainly is, and on ACTive AIdDeployment in Future Development with Engaging Sources for Almighty Weaponed Environments ..... Heavenly Safe Havens .... Granted and Granting Absolute Power and Colossal Energy to Global Command AI Control in Controlling Command with Virtual Communications to Assisting IntelAIgent Community Headquarters.
Does anyone want to suggest provision of anything else to improve and strengthen and harden onward progress/Deep See Operations veering towards Alien Intervention full to overflowing with Almighty Interludes? Greater IntelAIgent Games ACTivity is always warmly welcomed and enjoyed for testing and fitting proper use ....... the uses of which are many, extremely exciting and beautifully varied.
What is this? Some interplanetary bus service?
Actually, yes. Every couple of years the stars align (so to speak) and there's a short window to fly missions to Mars using less fuel than usual in a reasonable amount of time. The American mission that delivered Perseverance and Curiosity directly to the Martian surface took off at around the same time the Chinese Tianwen-1 orbiter/lander mission to Mars was launched back in July 2020.
Setting the sage for 'Mar Wars' ?? ...... cjb
Setting the stage for MarsWare to generate leading utilities with commanding facilities controlling otherworldly capabilities from and on Earth is the spinoff which delivers all manner of strange surprises with practically unknown consequences in TEMPESTuously ACTive Development Departments, methinks, and Top Gun JEDI AIMaster Pilot in those fields has one supplying everyone with everything they need to seed and feed to succeed in whatever endeavours precede and proceed before them and would lead them with rapid progress into a certainly uncertain but definitely extremely exciting future. Or do you think the future is already well planned some time ago ..... by a select few for a chosen few and one cannot change anything .... for better or for worse? Answers please on a posted virtual card to spaces below.:-)
:-) That's a nice trip switch your shared there, cjb, which can have one comfortably obsessing compulsively considering whether simply accidental or intriguingly unintentional, a typo or Freudian slip. It opens up a whole new can of worms for some who be more than just a select chosen few to go phishing with.
Bravo, China. Nice to see you, to see you, nice.
They'll not find anything either, but I suppose it's more about politics on earth than finding anything on Mars. ...... ZanzibarRastapopulous
That's very disruptively perceptive of you, ZanzibarRastapopulous, and more than a tad problematical for more than a select few in a previously self taught and crazily thought invulnerable and almighty chosen few.
What to do next for the best, is going to result in some very interesting and edutaining revelations having repercussions and consequences beyond compare and standard limited understanding.
"They'll not find anything either,"
Au contraire. Mars is the second most interesting place we can (barely) get to with current technology. The first would be the depths of our oceans. Also, Mars is probably the only place we could possibly terraform, although if that's possible at all the technology to do so is probably centuries beyond our current skills.
Anything that tells us more about the fourth planet should be welcome. Good for the Chinese.
The next EU-Russian Mars (ExoMars) effort is scheduled for 2022. Perhaps the Japanese or Indians or British -- if there is any British space program once Brexit settles out -- would like to take a shot as well.
there is no magnetic field to stop any atmosphere being stripped off by the sun.
The lack of a magnetic field IS a problem. And a nasty one as the result of going for a hike on a (temporarily) Earthlike Mars without reading the local space weather forecast seems likely to be fried martian. Or at least Martians that glow in the dark. Some form of radiation deflections seems high on the list ToDo list there. How to deflect it. Beats me. Ask Elon. Maybe he has some thoughts.
However, I don't think atmosphere depletion is an instantaneous process. I suspect that an artificial atmosphere would last longer than the probable half-life of the human race -- which I think likely is shorter than many folks think. Personally, I think mankind's survival so far is something of a miracle.
Which would also require inordinate amounts of energy
Shhh... If Elon hears that he will claim that "terraforming Mars" would be a great way to solve global warming by shipping all the hydrocarbons off earth and burning them in his rockets playing around with Mars!
And he could even do Bitcoin mining on Mars - let the CO2 pollute Mars instead!
I did some back of the envelope calculations, and with about 14GW running through a 60-km diameter superconducting coil, one at each 'pole' of the planet, you could generate a magnetic field similar to Earth's in magnitude, which should be enough to funnel the pesky solar wind and protect any newly-generated atmosphere.
So all you need are a couple of nuclear power plants, and two mahoosive coils.
I think it's time to put @Zanzibar Rastopoulos into the box labelled "troll" on this topic*, and stop feeding. If s/he had ever explained the negative attitude in a reasoned way, I might have a different opinion, but this just seems to be contrarianism for the sake of it.
S/he can be quite good on other topics.
I've explained several times that there isn't anything there to find and that really this is just grandstanding. About national prestige more than anything else.
The helicopter especially highlights that they don't have anything better to do than to put an RC helicopter up there that they themselves admit has little scientific value.
There are better and more important things to do.
I'm not alone in this view either I see the El Pais story on this also suggests that the primary objective is national prestige.
This sycophantic Mars/space fan boy crap is the real trolling. They're even banging on about terraforming like it's either possible, would happen in their lifetimes or that it would even be allowed to demolish that planets natural environment.
There is a little part of a full human that needs to push and push at margins and boundaries and it’s a fundamental part of us. Some haven’t got it, just like some don’t feel romantic love. Fortunately those who don’t have it are in the small minority and so humans continue to progress.
Public funds? The only "public funding" that SpaceX gets is when NASA pay for a service* (e.g., flying cargo / crew to the ISS". It's the same with the moon lander - they are buying a service, not funding Mars.
* The on-orbit refuelling trials are a bit different, but that is still payment for a specific work package with defined deliverables.
I've explained several times that there isn't anything there to find [...]
So how did you find out that there is nothing there to find? Did the clouds part and a mighty voice tell you? Was there a burning bush? Did a voice in your head just tell you. Was there mighty wind?
Because, you see, outside of your head it is no longer the middle ages, and a lot of quite clever people have worked out that if you want to know something, you have to go and look: you don't just decide you know. We call this 'science'. And it's amazing how well it works and how bad people are at the whole 'being told by God' thing. People thought the Sun went around the Earth, so they looked, and it didn't, then some German person quite famous for being smart thought the universe was static and eternal and other people looked and lo, it wasn't (and he had the grace to admit he was wrong even), then they thought that certain obviously silly mathematical toys of the German person were, well, obviously silly toys and they looked and they weren't and indeed now they've heard pairs of these obviously silly mathematical toys colliding. And we thought we knew stuff about Pluto and we went and looked and, fuck me, we were so wrong about everything we 'knew'. And so it goes on: every time we 'just knew' something either because we'd been told by some imagined God or because were ever so clever and we'd worked it out ... we went and looked and we were wrong, often spectacularly so.
But never mind: you're different I'm sure. When the great but somehow pseudonymous ZanzibarRastapopulous, tells us that 'there isn't anything there to find' then they're right, because they are far smarter than all the people who have been wrong.
I've explained several times that there isn't anything there to find and that really this is just grandstanding. About national prestige more than anything else.
And that explanation is based just on your opinion, not on any scientific data. Sure, some people may agree with that opinion. Some even manage to get that opinion into a newspaper. Doesn't mean it's an opinion that carries much weight and is worthy of further evaluation. It's just a small set of words, repeated over and over and devoid of any supporting action.
It's based on stuff having been sent there and not found anything.
These are big ticket vanity projects and there's plenty to find on earth.
They're not even very helpful from a space travel perspective. Musk's lot have made more progress on that score than NASA has since the 70s.
It's based on stuff having been sent there and not found anything.
In the early 1980s a group of people built a machine. Like various earlier machines of the same type, it didn't work. But the people who built it didn't think it would work: they were building it to find out if it was possible to build a machine like that that did work. They decided it was. Starting in 1990 they built a pair of much larger machines, which took them about 12 years. They were used for a few years, but again, they didn't work. And, again, the people who built them didn't really expect them to work: they were building them, again, to find out how to build such machines. From 2005 to 2015 they built another pair of machines, in the same buildings that had housed the previous pair. On the 14th of September 2015 this pair of machines did what they were designed to do. A Nobel prize was won. But they did more than they were designed to do: the things they found were quite surprising and are in the process of changing our idea about how various important processes in the universe work. These machines are currently being rebuilt yet again to make them better, and together with machines already built in Italy and Japan and others to come they will certainly continue to change our idea of how the universe works.
Here's the thing: there is technical progress. Outside your head it is no longer 1350. Each thing we send to Mars both helps discover stuff, and also helps us learn how to make things work on Mars so we can send better things to discover more stuff. Curiosity found conclusive evidence that there were large persistent bodies of water on Mars, that Mars had appropriate chemistry to support life, that there is currently organic carbon on Mars, that there are varying levels of methane (including some very strange and interesting bumps in the level) as well as a lot of interesting stuff about the atmosphere. It also showed that it was possible to land something weighing a tonne on Mars at all using a previously essentially untested and frankly rather implausible technique. Perserverance will discover new things as it has new instruments, will prepare samples for return to Earth where they can be looked at with machines which it is inconceivable to put on Mars, and has already shown that it is possible to fly a helicopter on Mars so that whatever rover follows it can use one to find interesting and safe places to look (getting trapped in sand has happened and is not good, and you can't find the interesting stuff from orbit).
But I'm sure this is all very boring to you, in your grey empty world.
(And yes: I am feeding the troll. I kind of enjoy feeding them: sorry.)
Moved to go back to the source article and run it through G***** Translate.
It could more felicitously be translated as "interplanetary".
You will not get that from a straight copy and paste (which I presume is what El Reg did). You need to play with GT a bit : for example try translating "interstellar" into Chinese and it gives "interplanetary" as alternative usage and vice versa.
You will not get that from a straight copy and paste (which I presume is what El Reg did). You need to play with GT a bit : for example try translating "interstellar" into Chinese and it gives "interplanetary" as alternative usage and vice versa.
Deepl turns the first paragraph into "On May 15, China's first Mars exploration mission, the Tianwen-1 rover landed in the southern pre-selected landing zone of the Martian Utopian Plain, leaving China's imprint on Mars for the first time and taking an important step in China's interplanetary exploration journey. Later, the Zhu Rong Mars rover will carry out global imaging of the landing site, self-test driving away from the landing platform and carry out roving probes in turn." on the first try.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Bring popcorn, but don't start popping it yet... a quick back-of-the-hand calculation suggests it's going to be about 4-5 years before they get close enough for the first bout to even start.
And then it will simultaneously be the most expensive, most technically advanced, and most lame Robot Wars episode *ever*
While the Soviet Union (1971) and Europe have attempted to land equipment on Mars before, these didn't last long enough to be called a successful mission. This makes China's triple whammy of a Mars orbiter, lander and rover seemingly working out so well even more impressive.
Also happy for NASA's two rovers & drone to have a bit more company on that planet now. Must be getting old, cruising past all those defunct rovers, landers and craters from unsuccessful landing attempts.
Going by a Daily Mail article that was sent to me by a mate in the UK, the US navy have been encountering some unusual flying objects, judging by the description of the manoeuvres of one craft, it had some kind of inertialess drive, if only we could do a rental deal with the owners, Mars trips could be regular.
Does the following report on the unusual encounter ..... https://www.rt.com/usa/523887-pentagon-confirms-ufo-video/ ... or is it Russian propaganda and/or US scare-mongering ......... attempting global brainwashing?
That has one of the video clips I saw, the modern US Navy are apparently still using WWII gun cameras.
I could get better photos of aerial objects at air shows in the seventies with a Practika camera and Ilford film.
I assume the aliens use some kind of cloaking technology that turns modern cameras into antiques.
You should always take those things with a pinch of salt. While I cannot discount the idea of a craft that moves in the way shown, a radar glitch is not entirely ruled out sometimes. While the glaring intention often comes back down to "they wanted to reduce our budget, but look at this shiny shiny threat we need to investigate!".
On the videos doing the rounds, whatever it is, it is not organic. The G forces alone were calculated at hundreds of times what a biological animal could tolerate. So it becomes a drone or AI craft that just likes smashing itself into the ocean at high speed, for no particular reason.
That must be the British militarys super secret new Watchkeeper 2.0, crashing at high speed for no reason is sort of their signature move. ..... Robin Bradshaw
What would you think if you discovered and/or were told that the following quite alienating proposal and revelation was essentially a MODified British confection with an avid westernised taste, massive hunger and insatiable thirst for the exotic and exotic eastern delights that are beautifully designed to capture and satisfy the incorrigible amateur and professional pirate and private venture capitalist alike, and to degrees never before even dreamed to be remotely possible?
Would you dismiss the notion even before asking and giving the UKGBNI Ministry of Defence Chiefs of Staff the opportunity to deny any and all knowledge of such a program which is submitted and pending with them? That would be fine chance lost to discover something both extremely troubling and immensely exciting which if not entertained and engaged with at home, by natural default migrates to sunnier and smarter shores abroad and greener pastures in foreign lands, which nowadays are journeys and inhabitations done virtually immediately in a flash via the power of a Zoom like call from anywhere you would be presently be.
GrahamC [2105161008] ....... being positive and encouraging of future engagement in DARPA like activities on https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2021/5/14/darpa-working-on-new-cultural-interpreterIdentify/Introduce globally unknown novel language[s] with an otherworldly and surreal view on Earthly matters .... an alien perspective which directly and sublimely impinges upon and fundamentally improves future likeable ACTive developments with command and control of critical virulent communications infrastructure and virtual AI exoskeletons, with media translating shared text into audiotelevisualised presentations for both live streaming and extremely simple recording/replaying/supplying into Random Access Memory and greater human consciousness/advanced enlightenment, ...... and IT and its support will effectively lead viewers and listeners to wherever one would be smart enough to effortlessly lead them with intelligently designed and imaginatively manufactured show movie, blockbuster pictures .... seeding and feeding future virtual reality broadbandcastings.
To think and profess that to be either difficult or too difficult to do, is to admit and accept that it be certainly the work of, and in the gift of, others to supply and enable others to supply with AIMentoring and Monitoring SafeGuards.
It is undoubtedly something worthy of a DARPA and Computational Cultural Understanding program and is freely shared here with that understanding.
The world, and how it is remotely governed, has changed, and the mistake to constantly make which guarantees serial failure in negative progress and corrupted stasis alike, is to not realise that it be so.
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Link to BBC thumbnail for anyone interested and with an account on another dodgy superpower.
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