China's Moon rover awake but immobile
Alexandra Witze
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.
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http://www.nature.com/news/china-s-moon-rover-awake-but-immobile-1.14906