Chang'e 3 landing and first lunar day of operations, Including landing site geology and localization Options

[elakdawalla]

Hmm. As far as I can tell, the photos at http://chn.chinamil.com.cn/jdtp/2013-12/15...ent_5691236.htm are still photographs of the displays at the Beijing control center, so we're still not anywhere close to raw images, but I agree that they are better-quality photographs of the displays than I've seen previously.

[4th rock from th...]

Yes.
I was talking about the overhead map. That was assembled from the original data. I checked with the descent frames and indeed for the map they were geometrically corrected.
So now we can derive a scale for the descent frames :-)
Nevertheless, it looks that the oficial site is that one - China Military.


Here's a pan I made from the photos on the link:

[Phil Stooke]

Very nice! Let's hope we get some more of these pics.

Phil

[Liss]

Very nice! Let's hope we get some more of these pics.

Phil

Today's two from http://china.cnr.cn/gdgg/201312/t20131222_514462502_1.shtml :

Lander from point D or E:



Going south (point E):

[dilo]

Fantastic images, finally!
Some crossed-eyes stereograms based on China-mail images (original screen captures were for parallel eyes):

[Explorer1]

What a change from ten years of looking at Mars images, huh? A strangely close horizon, long days, and of course no haze from air in billions of years...

Still no sign of Earth in the sky though; perhaps Yutu would have to park on a slope tilted to the north to see high enough?

[pospa]

... perhaps Yutu would have to park on a slope tilted to the north to see high enough?

I assume not necessarily. Yutu's camera mast has deployment actuator whitch perhaps can be use to fold the mast back. If not possible then the camera "head" should have its own elevation actuator to aim pancams and navcams up and down.
I guess they will take a picture of the mother Earth very soon. ... with China in the middle if constellation allows that, whith I'm not sure about

[kenny]

According to CNTV, the mutual photography sessions are over, five sessions in all, and the science work begins. Hopefully we will still see the occasional
distant views of the pair as they move further apart. I guess the large boulder SW and the large crater to the West will make nice targets.

"This was the fifth time the rover and the lander took photos of each since they arrived eight days ago. Scientists in Beijing have been processing them
and say scientific tasks can now begin.

"Ten pictures have been taken at five spots so far, and all of them are better than we expected. The rover has moved in a semi-circle around the lander.
Afterwards, they will begin to conduct scientific explorations of the geography and geomorphology of the landing spot and nearby areas, and materials
like minerals and elements there. We will also explore areas 30 meters and 100 meters beneath the lunar soil. The exploration will continue longer than
we planned, because all the instruments and equipments are working very well," said Wu Weiren, chief designer of China Lunar Probe Program."

CNTV last photo sessions

[4th rock from th...]

Two photos that make a nice stereo pair of the lander here:
http://chn.chinamil.com.cn/jwjj/2013-12/22...ent_5701132.htm

For convenience, I've assembled them:



Also interesting is a new pan from video grabs here:
http://d1jqu7g1y74ds1.cloudfront.net/wp-co..._Ken-Kremer.jpg

[Ron Hobbs]

I stumbled on the "Going south" image above on a Russian forum (I was searching for information on the Nauka module to ISS).

http://www.astronews.ru/cgi-bin/mng.cgi?pa...foto&id=949

The caption, translated by google reads:

"Chinese lunar rover Yuytu works in normal and stable mode after restarting on Friday. According to information rover again began to move off after the auxiliary parts of the system on December 16.
During December 21 "Jade Hare" drove 21 meters."

"Jade Hare," I like it. It seems that the Chinese have a global following of their mission whether they want it or not.

It looks to my uneducated eye that C3 might have landed up on one of the wrinkle ridges. Looking south I see a lower plain. Anyone know if that is true?

Ron

[SFJCody]

It's all very exciting this isn't it? A new lunar site, the first in decades!

The flag decal on the lander looks extraordinarily clear! Little touch of imagery enhancement, maybe? Not that I'd blame them, they have every right to be proud.

[tolis]

"Chinese lunar rover Yuytu works in normal and stable mode after restarting on Friday. According to information rover again began to move off after the auxiliary parts of the system on December 16.
During December 21 "Jade Hare" drove 21 meters."

The name is highly inappropriate. It's a *rover*, not a hopper..

[dilo]

Also interesting is a new pan from video grabs here:
http://d1jqu7g1y74ds1.cloudfront.net/wp-co..._Ken-Kremer.jpg

I think is better to report also the source :
http://www.universetoday.com/107388/chinas...-site-panorama/

[dvandorn]

I find it interesting that earlier American and Soviet unmanned landers made, almost immediately after landing, images of the interaction between the landing gear pads and the surface. Heck, the famous first shot from Surveyor 1 is of the landing gear pad and shows how it pushed back the lunar soil. (Yes, there were some Soviet landers that had no landing gear, much less footpads, and I know that the final Soviet sample return mission landed in the lunar night and didn't return a lot of scenic photos. But for those with landing gear pads that landed in sunlight, the first pics seemed always to be of the gear-soil interaction.)

In addition, I believe that pretty much all of the American Mars landers that used gear and footpads did the same thing. Remember the first image from the Viking 1 lander? A pic of the footpad sitting on the ground.

Chang'e 3 didn't take such images from the lander, at least that I've seen. But the latest images of the lander from Yutu seem to show very definite piles of freshly disturbed regolith sitting radially outwards from each pad. Not radially distributed around the circular pad -- radially from the lander itself. Out along lines drawn between the center of the vehicle through each footpad.

The only dynamic I can think of that would preferentially throw soil outwards from each pad would be one where the gear actually flexed outward, away from the octagonal lander body, at touchdown and then recoiled back to their normal deployed position. As the gear and struts look rather similar to the Apollo LM arrangement, this doesn't sound like something they would be designed to do.

Just an observation...

-the other Doug

[Phil Stooke]

There was this descent camera image taken after landing, showing a footpad at far right. The camera on top of the lander can't see the footpads.

Phil