NASAWatch on CGTN: China Lands A Rover On Mars
15 May 2021 Interview with CGTN Beijing
14 May 2021 Interview with CGTN Washington, DC
15 May 2021 Interview with CGTN Beijing
14 May 2021 Interview with CGTN Washington, DC
Historic. Mars is the Skeleton Coast of exploration spacecraft and now we have two countries of Earth who’ve landed rovers on it…the U.S. and China. They’re still years behind us, but they are ahead of everyone else in capability, at least as far as Mars is concerned. Waiting for photos to show that it was a soft landing. Maybe those photos aren’t already available somewhere of course. I haven’t checked recently.
Years behind in HSF and launch vehicles… not so sure about robotic spacecraft. Their lunar sample return mission was state of the art if you ask me.
NASAwatch will criticize NASA until the cows come home but will gladly self-sensor and walk on egg shells in order to avoid any criticism of China’s space program, such as the extreme lack of transparency that surrounded this event. Live information about the landing could only be obtained by amateur enthusiasts due to China’s insecurity and fear of failure.
If Keith were to criticize their space program on this website in any way, he would no longer be called upon to give his interviews on CGTN and would essentially be blacklisted from the network. As a result, NASAwatch is not able to provide takes on Chinese space developments with the same honesty and sense of reality that is applied to NASA, but instead can only offer cherry-picked, uncritical news blurbs in order to remain in good standing with CGTN. This is just something for readers to keep in mind.
You are full of shit, Chad. I speak my mind. I do not get paid to do these interviews and there is no measurable benefit that I have ever detected that boosts NASAWatch readership as a result of doing this. BTW I do not run “China Watch” either. You are more than welcome to not read NASAWatch anymore if you are so outraged.
China does lack transparency…in everything. They are paranoid that their people will learn too much about how bad their country is run. No one expects more on this from China than what we got. I didn’t. I would have been very surprised if they had done this more openly. Mars is very difficult. Their odds of success were slim. No one that paranoid would allow an opportunity to publish failure live.
https://twitter.com/planet4…
I don’t know if that Twitter link will expand here so I’ll quote it…
Jonathon McDowell (@planet4589)
“Parenthetically amused but hardly suprised that after a week of being chastized by the pro-China accounts because I criticized China over the CZ-5B reentry, now I’m getting it from the anti-China accounts because I’m praising them for the Mars success!”
See? Keith is not the only one. I watched a lot of experts on Twitter follow this landing in positive tones yesterday. I don’t like China either. I am a vocal critic. Yet even I can stop for a moment and say wow when they do something cool like this. Why can’t you?
Sounds like you’re the biased one.
As Americans we can do precious little to cause any changes in China’s space program, but we can damn well demand that NASA, our space agency, do better. Whether you want to admit or not, part of the reason that we don’t have a better space agency is because so few citizens have demanded that NASA do better.
That’s not to say that NASA doesn’t do great things. They absolutely do, but NASA can do so much better.
I think you are talking about Faux News.
Anyone know how China landed the rover? Did they use a method similar to NASA’s “sky crane”, or an airbag system?
From what I read it is more like the sky crane concept. The craft hover for a moment to look for a perfect landing site before the final decent.
The sky crane concept isn’t about hovering to find a good landing spot. That’s pretty conventional. The sky crane is about having the rockets hover while lowering the lander the rest of the way to the surface on a cable. That’s not what Tianwen-1 did. The final decent of the lander was propulsive. That’s relatively similar to what the Viking landers did, and what the Chang’e lunar landers have done.
Yet, not a single image from the landing site. Really, how do we know they landed successfully. Until actual landing site pics are released, it didn’t happen!
Call China and complain.
They are relaying through an orbiter in an eccentric orbit with a 49 hour period. That means they only get one short communications session every other day. Also, their large antennas on Earth are all in China, so they can only downlink from the orbiter for eight hours per day. It isn’t clear how long it will take them to get good images down. For practical purposes rather than PR, the engineering telemetry on the spacecraft’s status would come down before images.
A fantastic age we live in. Hope they release some pictures soon.
While some may complain China isn’t releasing photos or we’ve done this years before, but still China able to accomplish such difficult technical programs shows their technical prowess. Like their lunar landers and rovers it is a form of soft power projection. Countries around the world may not care about the science but such capability gets their attention.