Yutu Rover

On the 2nd of December 2013 China launched the Chang'e-3 mission to the moon. It included the Yutu rover, also known as Jade-Rabbit. Yutu was the name of a jade rabbit pet of a mythical Chinese moon goddess.

Soft landing on the moon was achieved on the fourteenth of December 2013. Yutu rolled out onto the lunar surface and was planned to operate for three months. It had cameras on a mast, ground-penetrating radar, an alpha particle x-ray spectrometer and a visible/infrared spectrometer. The lander and rover took pictures of each other and used their scientific instruments as planned.

Yutu had a mechanical control problem before the 25th of January 2014. It was no longer able to move and some instrument operations failed.

The Chinese had tested their technology in a simulated lunar environment for forty days before the mission launch. Still malfunctions occurred on the moon which mission operations was unable to specifically identify. A candidate cause for malfunctions would be dust stirred into electrostatic levitation along the terminator as the lunar day began and ended. Such dust grains can shoot higher than the height of the rover and lander and can cause problems with complicated mechanical devices, especially telescoping structural elements. Placing elements of a rover in gas tight sleeves with accordion type folds to protect them from dust might help while limiting the range of motion of devices and using up scarce mass and volume budgets. There was considerable attention to documenting mission performance in a step by step way but now there is more information to show mission developers what sort of self diagnostics are most likely to be helpful on future missions.