The rover gets its power from photovoltaics panels and relies on a radioactive power source to keep instrumentation warm during each two-week lunar night. But something has gone wrong.
Yutu is designed to position itself so that one of its solar panels is angled to capture the rising Sun. The other solar panel is designed to fold over the rest of instrumentation to insulate it from the lunar cold. During the first lunar night all things were optimal but in the second the mechanism didn’t work as planned and it appears Yutu may not survive this second lunar night.
The 140 kilogram (300 pound) rover was exploring Sinus Iridum, the Plain of Rainbows when the failure occurred. Lunar dust may have been kicked up the wheels interfering with the folding mechanism. Normally the instrumentation on board extends above the rover on a mast and then descends at the onset of lunar night. And although that part of the mechanism worked the solar panel that then folds over it failed.
What this shows is that the environment in which rovers like Yutu, Curiosity, Spirit and Opportunity operate in is fraught with peril. They can fail at any time. For Spirit on Mars it was about getting stuck in sand and then losing the ability for it to keep its solar panels optimally positioned for power generation. For Yutu it appears to be a design failure and the cold of a lunar night.
The Chinese space agency isn’t holding much hope. Chang’e 3, the stationary lander, however, continues to operate as planned.
China’s space agency provided a live feed of the descent and landing and on arrival issued an eye-level image from the landing site. We should see more footage and photographs in the next few days as China deploys Yu Tu or Jade Rabbit, its 120-kilogram (260 pound) rover to be deployed to explore the area. Jade Rabbit is designed to manage slopes of up to 30 degrees and can travel up to 200 meters (660 feet) per hour.
The lander combines solar power and a radioactive thermoelectric generator to supply power. The latter is important during the two-week lunar night. The rover is powered by solar panels with batteries for night. Jade Rabbit, like its cousins, Curiosity and Opportunity on Mars navigate using a camera with integrated local hazard analysis. It can operate autonomously but for the most part will be controlled from Earth.
The lander has an on board ultraviolet telescope, an extreme ultraviolet camera. Jade Rabbit has an on board alpha particle x-ray spectrometer to study the composition of the lunar surface and subsurface. Watch my Twitter feed in coming days for links to images and data collected by this first for China.
China’s next mission is planned for 2015 when it will send another robotic mission to the surface but this one will retrieve lunar rock samples to return to Earth in 2017. China will then have duplicated what both the Soviet Union and the United States accomplished in the 1970s, the Soviets using robots and the Americans, human crewed Apollo missions. China is expected to launch its first human-crewed mission to the Moon sometime in the 2020s. This will come after China duplicates another feat of current space faring nations, establishing its own space station in low-Earth orbit.
