Failure is always an option in space: Starship promises and Zhurong standstill
We live in an era when a good part of the population is not aware that for over fifty years man in space has not ventured further than the Earth’s orbit, only a few hundred kilometers above the increasingly warm Adriatic Sea.
Today we will take a brief look at what Starship brings to humanity. You will find more technical information about the rocket and recent launch right here.
At the beginning of the space age, only the Russian Federation and the United States of America had the knowledge, technology, power and money to fly into space. The space race was primarily a race between two militarily-geopolitically opposed camps.
Decades passed and other powerful states slowly joined that club. Technologies have advanced and with them accessibility. It’s not even twenty years since initiatives shyly appeared outside the state apparatus that set the goal of space.
Several years have passed and we’ve seen launches of small, private rockets. Soon everything escalated. Today, space travel is a big business, supply and demand are there, technologies are the same, rockets are going into the sky every day.
Starship seems to be the future of manned spaceflight and creators assure the public that it will provide almost unimaginable progress.
This is the first time that humanity really has a materialized means of transportation for a large number of people with which it is possible to reach space. This is the moment from which we will start counting the years that preceded the colonization of the human species far from our mother planet. In theory, at least.
Zhurong the Mars rover is no longer moving
As it seems, the Chinese Mars rover Zhurong has not moved from its place and Western scientists are wondering if its mission is over?
As of May 2022, the Chinese space agency (CNSA – the Chinese space agency) has not given a single official report about the rover.
The aforementioned data about the complete standstill, and perhaps even the death of the rover, did not come from the Chinese space agency, but from NASA scientists who manage the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
This orbiter is imaging the surface of Mars and the photos show a change in the position of the Chinese rover between March 11 and September 8, 2022, after which the rover went into hibernation due to the coming long, cold Martian winter accompanied by dust storms.
Images taken in February this year show that the Zhurong rover has not moved since September, despite the fact that CNSA has indicated it will return to action in late 2022.
It should be noted that the winter on Mars is extreme. The area surveyed by the Zhurong rover experienced low temperatures of -20 C to -100 C during the night. In addition, the entire area was under the influence of large dust storms. When dust covers the solar panels then they cannot produce energy!
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