Chang'e-4 farside landing mission Options

[Phil Stooke]

https://www.bilibili.com/read/cv8125931

Here is a link to a new drive diary for day 23, in Chinese but you can translate it well enough in Chrome.

Interesting for a couple of place names which I'm going to have to think about. I would like to know more about any names, if anyone sees any.

EDIT: Two names are mentioned, Longtan (= Dragon Pool, a park in Beijing, though the name is used in many other places) for the crater now being observed, and one referring to the rock analyzed back on day 3. In my translation of the website the name is rendered as 'Romania' but the characters used are the same ones rendered previously as Qi Yuan = Unexpected Encounter. If anyone can explain the connection to Romania I would be pleased to know it.

Phil

[Xerxes]

In my translation of the website the name is rendered as 'Romania' but the characters used are the same ones rendered previously as Qi Yuan = Unexpected Encounter. If anyone can explain the connection to Romania I would be pleased to know it.

It's quite a mistranslation! If you reduce the translation to just "“奇缘”" (note the quotes!), then Google Translate gives "Romania". Actually, "奇缘" means "unexpected encounter" and thus is an idiom for "romance" (also the name of the Disney movie called Pocahontas in English). Notice that removing the quotes yields "romance". I suspect somewhere in the Google Translate corpus, some confused Chinese speaker tried to translate an instance where "“奇缘”" (note the quotes) appeared in their text, and they screwed it up, misspelling "romance" as "romania". Since this lexeme with the quotes appears so rarely, Google Translate gives a heavy weight to that one bad translation when it sees quotes. You can try to help them out by flagging the translation as incorrect; I'm not sure how effective such user-submitted suggestions are.

[Phil Stooke]

Thanks very much for that. It is very helpful.

Phil

[Station]

Hello,

Thanks Phil for the picture.

btw. I suppose I'm wrong, but... is there any Yutu-2 made onboard movie clip or something which shows some rover's path/trek ?

I believe there's no such thinkg like TV camera mounted on Yutu's board but I meant some .GIF animation etc. done so far.

Thanks in advance for any information.

Maciej

[Phil Stooke]

Hello Maciej,

There are no videos like that. There have been a few short clips using the hazard cameras, showing the sun angle changing and shadows moving. Unfortunately the hazard camera images are not released, as far as I know. Maybe someone can correct me if I am mistaken about that.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

Yutu 2 will be shutting down for the lunar night about now, if it hasn't already. The end of lunar day 24. I anticipate that it will do nothing for lunar day 25 to allow all attention to be focussed on Chang'e 5 (basing this on what happened when Tianwen 1 was launched, though that also involved some work on ground systems so I may be wrong).

CLEP released an image to mark the end of the 24th day, but the same image was released on day 21 so it's not new. 24 m driven according to the CLEP Weibo.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

No drive diary or other information yet for day 24, but I am revising my idea that CE5 will result in limited or no activity for Yutu 2 in the next lunar day. The CE5 activities will be mainly over by the time the Sun rises over the CE4 landing site so maybe it will just be a normal day.

Phil

[Hungry4info]

New LRO imagery tracking the progress of Yutu-2. There's an animation showing all the images from LRO aligned from the landing through to Oct 2020.

http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/posts/1168

[monty python]

I love this. Really gives a feel for the travel!

[Phil Stooke]

A new image shows some craters - here I have reprojected it roughly to compare with a map:



That must have been taken about here:




The lighting is late in the lunar day, so near the end of day 24. I am trying to reconcile that with the total drive distance for the day, and I will update the map when I have something figured out.

I have seen a picture on a Chinese forum with an incorrect estimate of the end of day 24 position. It is NOT near the craters at the top far left of this map.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

I'm starting to think that Chang'e 4 and Yutu 2 are not doing anything during lunar day 25 so all attention (and communication infrastructure?) can focus on Chang'e 5, as I had suggested earlier. Looking forward to some definite news.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

wrong again! A tweet by Andrew Jones fills in some details:

https://twitter.com/AJ_FI/status/1341247990439305219

The tweet includes a map which stops at the end of day 24, not day 25 (the last site is numbered LE02404, the 4th stop on day 24), but it lets me make sense of the drives on day 24 which I didn't have figured out before. Yutu 2 drove nearly 11 m on day 25 (apparently testing new hazard avoidance software).

EDIT: oops, put the map here instead on in the map thread. I have moved it now.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

A tweet by Andrew Jones gives a drive of 28 m during the 26th lunar day, just ended.

Phil

[Phil Stooke]

AT the bottom of this page:

https://9ifly.spacety.com/thread-93232-9-1.html

on the Chinese 9ifly forum is a set of pictures from a lunar day 26 drive diary which I have not seen yet.

https://9ifly.spacety.com/thread-93232-9-1.html


There are some details of VNIS rock analysis and driving which give me a bit more information for mapping. This image:



is a composite of two on the forum, a drive planning map and a look back along the tracks which I have roughly reprojected to match the map.


A year ago there was a big data release with lots of images which Doug used to make panoramas and which showed up here. Rather than wait another year the Chinese team has been releasing data roughly monthly, much of it covering the same time period as the pictures but including VNIS and radar data as well. The latest release is for the 143th lunar day so it may have new images for us to play with. Source: "Scientific data obtained during the thirteenth [lunar day] of the four scientific payloads carried on the Chang'e-4 lander and rover."

https://moon.bao.ac.cn/

(the URL for the data is now https, no longer http, so bookmarks for it may need updating)


Phil

[Phil Stooke]

Mars, Mars, Mars... Meanwhile on the Moon Yutu 2 is just about at the end of lunar day 27, probably shut down already.

Phil