Quote from: woods170 on 06/15/2015 07:33 amRobust little rover.Well, the fact it's just sitting there doing nothing is probably helping its longevity Chang'e 3 and Yutu are now the longest-lived lunar spacecraft ever by a considerable margin, right?
Robust little rover.
Actually, the fact that the little jade rabbit can't position itself to the best attitude for solar heating/radiative cooling and can't close its thermal cover to protect the electronics boxes from the extreme cold of the lunar night means that just sitting there makes it even harder for it to survive this long.
Quote from: the_other_Doug on 06/15/2015 10:21 pmActually, the fact that the little jade rabbit can't position itself to the best attitude for solar heating/radiative cooling and can't close its thermal cover to protect the electronics boxes from the extreme cold of the lunar night means that just sitting there makes it even harder for it to survive this long.Mm, good point. Whatever happened to Chang'e 4 and its rover anyway? Weren't they supposed to launch this year?
Yutu data reveals new type of lunar basalthttp://www.sci-news.com/space/chinese-rover-yutu-new-type-lunar-basalt-03532.html
All of Chang'e 3's images have been made public. See http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2016/01221450-china-invites-public-on-board.html for details and the links to the website.
The Doppler tracking data of the Chang’e 3 lunar mission is used to constrain the stochastic background of gravitational wave in cosmology within the 1 mHz to 0.05 Hz frequency band. Our result improves on the upper bound on the energy density of the stochastic background of gravitational wave in the 0.02 Hz to 0.05 Hz band obtained by the Apollo missions, with the improvement reaching almost one order of magnitude at around 0.05 Hz. Detailed noise analysis of the Doppler tracking data is also presented, with the prospect that these noise sources will be mitigated in future Chinese deep space missions. A feasibility study is also undertaken to understand the scientific capability of the Chang’e 4 mission, due to be launched in 2018, in relation to the stochastic gravitational wave background around 0.01 Hz.