Chinese lunar rover jade hare latest. The six-wheeled Jade Hare will land on the moon in Rainbow Bay

On Wednesday information Agency China News Service (CNS) reported that the Chinese lunar rover Yutu - the Jade Hare - has been officially declared out of service. According to the agency, the device never recovered from the lunar night, and when the lunar day arrived on February 10, after unsuccessful attempts to activate the lunar rover, Chinese specialists were forced to give up and admit defeat.

However, later reports of a different kind appeared in the Chinese media. reports that experts have not yet lost hope of bringing the device back to life. Thus, the press secretary of the Yutu mission, Pei Zhaoyu, told Chinese National Radio that the lunar rover “is alive, experts have a signal, but experts cannot resolve it.” On his account on Sina Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter), Pei Zhaoyu wrote: “He has come to life again! At least he's alive and now we can save him."

This situation is reminiscent of the disaster of the Russian Phobos-Grunt research apparatus, which in November 2011 was launched to the Martian satellite Phobos, but was unable to reach the desired trajectory, remaining in Earth orbit.

A few months later, the device entered the dense layers of the atmosphere and burned up. Specialists had been reporting the presence of a signal for weeks, but they still refused to admit the device was lost.

The Jade Hare landed in the Rainbow Bay crater in mid-December aboard the Chang'e 3 lander. In three decades of lunar silence, this was the first expedition to the Moon.

And, importantly, the first soft landing of a Chinese aircraft in history.

This success was noted in his big December press conference by the Russian President, who congratulated China on the successful landing, saying: “We are all global community and Russia - we are waiting for the results of this work.”

In addition to the purely political preferences China received from this mission, the lunar rover was intended to explore the geological features of the lunar surface and search for natural resources. Before its death, the lunar rover managed to transmit just over 4,600 images to Earth.

Problems with the “Jade Hare”, when it was not possible to deploy its solar panel over the lunar rover, which, in addition, would have protected it from the harmful effects of the approaching lunar night. Without this protection, the Chinese rover's electronics were practically doomed to freeze to death. Chinese experts hoped that their “Jade Hare” would be able to survive in lunar conditions for three months. They explain his premature death by the complexities of the lunar landscape.

Chinese representatives prefer not to talk about the details of the death of their lunar rover.

The moving parts of any mechanism on the Moon are exposed not only to radiation and temperature changes, but also to lunar dust. In this difficult situation, it is necessary to understand what exactly happens to the device before it fails. Anything could happen, such as lubrication problems that could lead to additional friction or even “cold fusion” of the metal surfaces.

China's lunar program, which involves exploring the Moon with the help of robots and astronaut flights, is characterized by duplication - two identical modules are created, and the second one comes into play if any trouble happens to the first, but this second one will already be prepared for such trouble. China has already built another landing module, Chang'e-4, which is planned to be sent to the Moon in the next few years.

The first of the probes in this series, Chang'e-1, was sent into orbit around the Moon in 2007. The mission then ended in complete success. The device transmitted a huge amount of data to Earth, from which, in particular, the first ever complete three-dimensional map of the Moon was built. Chang'e-1 completed its research program by crashing into the lunar surface at full speed in accordance with the experiment.

Then, with the help of a more powerful launch vehicle, the next probe, Chang'e-2, was sent to the Moon, which, after orbiting the Moon for a short time, went to the Tautatis asteroid.

Experts suggest that China will repeat its attempt to send a lunar rover to the lunar surface. But, apparently, this event will be preceded by a long pause, during which Chinese experts will try to figure out the reasons for the failure of the Jade Hare in order to save his follower from the troubles that caused his premature death.

While Russia was rising from its knees with a nanotechnological Olympic torch, the Ukrainians were fighting the Maidan, and the United States was fighting for world peace, so no matter how the world looked at it, no stone would be left unturned... at this time, the Chinese lunar rover "Yutu" ("Moon Hare") successfully... landed on the moon? In general, he sat down on the surface of the Moon. This was reported by Chinese state television, according to the Associated Press. IN live showed footage taken by the lunar rover.

Yutu landed on the Moon aboard the Chang'e-3 spacecraft, which was launched from Earth on December 1, 2013. On Saturday, December 14, the Chinese spacecraft Chang'e-3 successfully landed on the Moon. Communication with the device was interrupted for 720 seconds, but immediately after that information about a soft landing was received at the Beijing Mission Control Center.

The landing took place in the Rainbow Bay crater, located in the Sea of ​​Rains, Xinhua reports. The Lunokhod will operate on the satellite for three months. The device is equipped with solar panels, navigation and panoramic cameras, X-ray and infrared spectrometers and other equipment. The developers of the Jade Hare managed to create a highly efficient power supply system. In bright light, part of the energy received is accumulated in batteries, and in weak light, the accumulated energy will be used to maintain the operation of the device. The Lunokhod is equipped with six wheels, and its maximum speed- 200 meters per hour.
In addition to the Moon Hare, the device delivered a Chinese flag to the Moon.

Chang'e-3 was launched on December 2 from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center using a modified version of the Long March-3B launch vehicle. The launch is part of China's three-phase lunar exploration program.
The first stage took place in 2007 - Chang'e-1 was launched. He worked in lunar orbit for 16 months. As a result, a high-resolution three-dimensional map of its surface was compiled. In 2010, a second research vehicle was sent to the Moon to photograph the areas.
The launch of Chang'e 3 marked the beginning of the second stage of the Chinese program. It includes the spacecraft entering the orbit of the Moon, landing on its surface and returning back.
The third stage will take place in 2017 - another device will be sent to the Moon, the main task of which will be to deliver samples of lunar rocks to our planet. Cosmonauts from China will go to the Moon after 2020.

The name "Yutu" (玉兔, literally "Jade Rabbit" or "Moon Hare") was chosen open competition, which took place in the fall. The operation of Chang'e-3 will be the second stage of the Chinese lunar program. During the third stage, which is scheduled for 2020, China plans to deliver lunar soil to Earth.

Moon hare - in folklore different nations world hare or rabbit living on the moon. This idea arose due to a pareidolic visual illusion - dark spots on the surface of the Moon were perceived as the figure of a hare or rabbit.

Probably the earliest mention of the Moon Hare is the poetic collection “Chu Verses,” written in ancient China during the Western Han Dynasty: it says that in the Moon Palace lives a white moon hare (Chinese: 月兔), which, sitting in the shade of a cinnamon guihua tree, all year round pounding the potion of immortality in a mortar.

The moon hare crushes the potion of immortality.
Embroidery from a Chinese imperial robe, 18th century.

Other Han Dynasty poets often called the moon hare "jade hare" (Chinese: 玉兔, yu tu) or "golden hare" (Chinese: 金兔, jin tu), and these phrases came to be frequently used to refer to the Moon.
A little later, a myth appeared in China about Chang'e, the wife of the shooter Hou Yi, who stole the potion of immortality, flew to the moon and turned into a toad there. In later versions, the legends about Chang'e and the moon hare gradually merged together, and they began to say that Chang'e became the goddess of the Moon and lives in the Moon Palace along with the moon hare.

Poetic. As for space technology, China became the third country after the USSR and the USA that managed to successfully land a spacecraft on the surface of the Moon.
The last successful landing of a spacecraft took place in 1976. Made that landing space station Luna-24, which delivered 170 grams of soil to Earth...

At the end of November 2013, we reported on China's plans to study the surface natural satellite Land and take pictures.

On Monday, December 2, 2013 (December 1, 21:30 Moscow time), a historic event took place. And already. For a while they turned around celestial body at a distance of 100 kilometers above its surface.

Now China is proud to announce that on December 14, 2013, the Chang'e-3 spacecraft with the Yutu (Jade Hare) rover on board made a soft landing, and to date.

The Chinese lunar exploration program started in 2007. Then the Chang'e-1 orbiter was launched into space, which orbited the satellite for 16 months (1 year and 4 months), and based on the results of its work, scientists compiled detailed map lunar landscape in high resolution. Then in 2010, China sent the Chang'e-2 satellite. The current mission is aimed at studying the lunar soil using a rover, and in 2017 it is planned to launch a device that will deliver rock samples to Earth.

Artist's impression of the Jade Hare rover

(illustration by China National Space Administration).

A special reason for the pride of the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire is the fact that they became only the third to land a lunar rover on the surface of the Earth’s satellite, after the United States and Soviet Union. It is equally important that the last landing of an earthly vehicle on the Moon took place back in 1976, when our compatriots landed the Luna-24 automatic station.

The landing of the Chang'e-3 apparatus took the engineers 11 minutes. Employees of the Beijing Aerospace Command and Control Center began landing the device when it was 15 kilometers above the surface of the Moon.

The softness of the lunar landing depended entirely on the efficiency of the new engines, which today are the most powerful ever built by the Chinese into a spacecraft. The machine automatically adjusted its power between 1,500 and 7,500 Newtons in order to balance the gravitational thrust and carefully land the lander on the surface of the Earth's satellite.

The head of the Chinese lunar exploration program, Jun Yan () from the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reports that his main worry was that the engine might fail or the automatic control system - the eyes and ears of the spacecraft - might fail. But when the landing was successfully completed, a real celebration began in the building of the Beijing Mission Control Center.

Rainbow Bay is the site of the planned lunar landing of the Chang'e-3 spacecraft.

(Illustration by NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University).

However, there were still slight deviations from the planned plan. Initially, representatives of the mission management reported that they should occur at the Sinus Iridum point (Rainbow Bay crater), since this place was well explored by orbiters and was chosen as optimal for landing on the Moon.

Local media even stated that Chang'e-3 landed there, but Chinese scientists subsequently confirmed that the device came into contact with the surface of the Moon slightly east of the originally chosen point, namely, in the Mare Monsim.

Perhaps such an error will even benefit the satellite’s researchers: in the Sea of ​​Rains there is greatest number the most unexplored lunar rocks that will help restore the evolutionary history of our planet’s satellite.

The celebration of the historical event continued after the Yutu rover, the “Jade Hare,” left the spacecraft seven hours after landing on the Moon. The six-wheeled, 140-kilogram rover began its three-month journey through the craters and plains of Selene. Its most important task, Yan reports, is to use deep-sensing radar - a device that can “look” to a depth of about 100 meters below the surface and analyze the composition of deep-seated rocks.

Also, using its onboard laboratory, the Jade Hare will study the composition and distribution of minerals on the surface. To do this, he has two unique instruments: an infrared spectrometer and an alpha particle X-ray spectrometer (APXS). Mineral analysis will be carried out during the rover's long journey.

Photo of the Jade Hare rover taken by the Chang'e-3 lander

(CNTV photo).

The landing module is also equipped with various telescopes and cameras, with the help of which observations of the visible Universe will be made throughout the whole year. Moreover, scientists plan to use the rover to install two telescopes on the lunar surface, which will become a permanent observatory.

The device has already taken the first pictures. Only they do not depict distant clusters of galaxies, but the landing module itself, photographed by the Jade Hare rover, and the lunar rover, filmed by the camera on the module. On Sunday evening, December 15, 2013 (Moscow time), cameras on both structures were activated. The sent images convinced the mission's leaders that the first and most difficult stage was successful.

In the photographs you can clearly see the Chinese flag placed by the rover on the Moon, as a symbol of the fact that it was engineers from the Celestial Empire who became one of the few who managed to touch, although not with their feet, the surface of the Earth’s satellite.

The Jade Hare lunar rover will become a pioneer, but who knows. (They may be ahead of or, which does not detract from the achievements of Chinese scientists). For now, the machines are running.

The first image taken on the Moon by a camera built into the Chang'e-3 lander

(CNTV photo).

Yutu is capable of reaching speeds of up to 200 meters per hour and climbing slopes of up to 30 degrees. Power is provided through solar panels, which will accumulate energy in batteries during the daytime and use it economically during the two-week lunar nights. To heat the device during the cold season, radioisotope heaters containing plutonium-238 will also operate.

Members of the space flight control team do not yet believe in their success, but are already applauding each other

(CNTV photo).

But for the Chinese there is still a reason to go to the moon, and it's not just about patriotism. Experts from China claim that on the surface of the natural satellite there are deposits of uranium, titanium and various minerals. In addition, this is because the Moon has no atmosphere, and therefore no cloudy weather.

There was recently a rumor in the Chinese media that: they plan to establish a military missile base on the satellite to test weapons and launch research and combat missiles into space or to Earth. Even if these plans do not come to fruition, the proposed area for the base will need to be studied.

The element that deserves the most attention, according to the Chinese news agency Xinhua, is helium-3, an isotope of a well-known chemical element common on the Moon, which will become “an energy source ideal for replacing oil and gas.”

In theory, helium-3 mined on the Moon can be used to generate electricity for 10 thousand years, but in practice this is not yet feasible. Required reactors thermonuclear fusion simply doesn't exist.

According to Chinese myths, a jade hare lives on the moon and poundes the powder of immortality in a mortar.

"Obviously, one day we will exhaust our reserves of fossil fuels such as coal or gas. And the Moon has at least one million metric tons of helium-3," says Ouyang Ziyuan, a cosmochemist and member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Of course, delivering all these resources to Earth will cost cosmic sums, and it is not yet clear whether such expenses will pay off. But perhaps the next spacecraft, Chang'e-4, which will replace Chang'e-3, will be able to deliver invaluable helium-3, and the Chinese will be able to convince the world community of the need for a program for its mass production.

Finally, it is worth mentioning how the first Chinese lunar rover got its unusual name. It is not difficult to guess that it is rooted in mythology. According to Chinese mythology, once upon a time there lived a beautiful woman named Chang'e (the spacecraft is named after her). She stole from the gods and drank the elixir of immortality and suddenly noticed that her skin and hair began to lighten. The woman jumped and flew high into the sky until she reached the threshold of the Moon Palace. The gods found out that the beauty drank the elixir to become immortal like them, and they were angry with her. To punish the vain woman, they turned her into a three-legged toad and settled her on the moon.

Since then, Chang'e has lived there in the company of the lunar jade hare, who to this day poundes in a mortar the potion of immortality for the gods and his toad companion, who has become the goddess of the Moon and the night sky. Symbolic names for the apparatus and the lunar rover were chosen by popular vote.