Hackaday links: January 15, 2023
It appears the Martian winter has taken another casualty, with reports that Chinese ground controllers have lost contact with the Zhurong rover. The solar-powered rover was put into hibernation in May 2022, thanks to a dust storm that kicked in a few months before the onset of local winter. Controllers hoped to be able to reestablish contact with the machine once spring arrived in December, but the rover remains silent. It may have suffered the same fate as Opportunity, whose solar panels were covered in dust after a global sandstorm and eventually died.
What's worse, it seems the Chinese are also having trouble talking to the Tianwen-1 orbiter. There are reports that controllers cannot download data from the satellite which is a shame as it could potentially be used to image the Zhurong landing site at Utopia Planitia to see what that is happening. All of this should be taken with a grain of dust, of course, since the Chinese aren't known for being transparent with their space program. But we hope the rover and orbiter will defy the odds and start doing science again soon.
Click to enlarge - you won't regret it. Image Credit: NRAO/GBO/Raytheon/NSF/AUICloser to home, you might have heard there's a place in West Virginia that really, really doesn't like alien RF noise, to the point where the cafeteria microwave is inside a Faraday cage. This is the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000 square mile electromagnetic radiation safety zone around the Green Bank Telescope. But the rule against microwaves is apparently negotiable, as the massive radio telescope is now equipped with a 700-watt microwave transmitter that was used to take an incredibly detailed image of Tycho Crater. The GBT transmitter, which is less powerful than the caged microwave in the cafeteria, painted the Moon with signals that bounced back to the Very Long Baseline Array, a radio telescope with dishes at ten locations across the United States. United. The returned photo was incredible, and with a resolution of 5 meters, the sharpest image of the Moon ever taken from Earth. They also used the system to image a potentially 1km planet-killing asteroid from a distance of 2.1 million km. Not bad for a half microwave.
If you have someone in your life who doesn't like electronics, you're in luck. Our friend Leo Fernekes has launched a new series of videos on learning electronics. His first episode covers the fundamentals of current flow and resistance and we found it to be very well done. Don't forget that Leo is an autodidact, a...
It appears the Martian winter has taken another casualty, with reports that Chinese ground controllers have lost contact with the Zhurong rover. The solar-powered rover was put into hibernation in May 2022, thanks to a dust storm that kicked in a few months before the onset of local winter. Controllers hoped to be able to reestablish contact with the machine once spring arrived in December, but the rover remains silent. It may have suffered the same fate as Opportunity, whose solar panels were covered in dust after a global sandstorm and eventually died.
What's worse, it seems the Chinese are also having trouble talking to the Tianwen-1 orbiter. There are reports that controllers cannot download data from the satellite which is a shame as it could potentially be used to image the Zhurong landing site at Utopia Planitia to see what that is happening. All of this should be taken with a grain of dust, of course, since the Chinese aren't known for being transparent with their space program. But we hope the rover and orbiter will defy the odds and start doing science again soon.
Click to enlarge - you won't regret it. Image Credit: NRAO/GBO/Raytheon/NSF/AUICloser to home, you might have heard there's a place in West Virginia that really, really doesn't like alien RF noise, to the point where the cafeteria microwave is inside a Faraday cage. This is the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000 square mile electromagnetic radiation safety zone around the Green Bank Telescope. But the rule against microwaves is apparently negotiable, as the massive radio telescope is now equipped with a 700-watt microwave transmitter that was used to take an incredibly detailed image of Tycho Crater. The GBT transmitter, which is less powerful than the caged microwave in the cafeteria, painted the Moon with signals that bounced back to the Very Long Baseline Array, a radio telescope with dishes at ten locations across the United States. United. The returned photo was incredible, and with a resolution of 5 meters, the sharpest image of the Moon ever taken from Earth. They also used the system to image a potentially 1km planet-killing asteroid from a distance of 2.1 million km. Not bad for a half microwave.
If you have someone in your life who doesn't like electronics, you're in luck. Our friend Leo Fernekes has launched a new series of videos on learning electronics. His first episode covers the fundamentals of current flow and resistance and we found it to be very well done. Don't forget that Leo is an autodidact, a...
What's Your Reaction?
