[meteorite-list] China's Moon Rover Awake But Immobile

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 15:07:12 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201403212207.s2LM7C2E015297_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.nature.com/news/china-s-moon-rover-awake-but-immobile-1.14906

China's Moon rover awake but immobile

Yutu rover resumes taking data but is still hampered by mechanical failure.

Alexandra Witze
Nature Magazine
19 March 2014

China's Moon rover Yutu, or "Jade Rabbit", has stopped hopping. But its
ears are still twitching - and communicating with Earth.

Last week Yutu and its companion spacecraft, the Chang'e 3 Moon lander,
awoke from a period of dormancy after the frigid, two-week lunar night
- the third awakening since landing on 14 December, Chinese scientists
said this week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands,
Texas. The probes continue to gather data and send it back to Earth.

But Yutu may never move more than the 100-110 metres it has already travelled
from its landing site - in the Mare Imbrium. Mission officials had hoped
that Yutu would travel to the rim of a nearby crater and explore it, but
a mechanical failure in Yutu's drive system has stilled the rover since
late January.

The rover has already used its ground-penetrating radar to probe the structure
of the lunar soil more than 100 metres deep. Those data are still being
processed, but Le Qiao, a planetary scientist at the China University
of Geosciences in Wuhan, is anxious to see whether the results confirm
the thickness of basaltic rocks at the landing site. Using satellite images
of craters that expose the underlying layer, Qiao's team estimates that
the basaltic rocks are 41-46 metres thick at the landing site.

Early results from the rover's alpha-particle X-ray spectrometer also
hint at the chemical composition of the landing site. A presentation led
by scientists at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing showed
that the instrument analysed the chemical makeup of lunar soil at two
locations. It spotted expected major chemical elements such as magnesium,
aluminium, silicon, potassium and calcium.

Much of the purpose of having a rover is lost, though, if Yutu can no
longer gather data from different areas.

Scientists were hoping to see more of the Chinese lunar data at the conference,
says Alexander Basilevsky, a lunar geologist at the Vernadsky Institute
of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry in Moscow. 'They should have
something by now," he says. Basilevsky is comparing the geology of Yutu's
landing site to a site about 500 kilometres away, where the Soviet Lunokhod-1
rover travelled in 1970. Comparing the two could show how widespread different
rock types are in the region, he says.

Even if Yutu never moves again, it and the Chang'e 3 lander will keep
taking data. And Chinese officials have already talked about Chang'e 4,
a mission similar to Chang'e 3 that will launch to a different part of
the Moon next year.

Nature
doi:10.1038/nature.2014.14906
Received on Fri 21 Mar 2014 06:07:12 PM PDT