China’s Moon atlas is the most detailed ever made

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01223-0

by politelemon • 2 years ago

153 78 2 years ago

nature.com

herodotus• 2 years ago

A book? A website? If a book, how does one buy it? If a website, what is the link?

A search just turns up essentially the article above which seems to be a copy and paste of the news release.

boomboomsubban2• 2 years ago

From a phys.org story on the matter, there's a 200MB jpeg. https://dx.doi.org/10.12176/03.99.02797

Seems to still be in the process of being proofed.

lqet• 2 years ago

Direct link to the JPEG:

https://china.scidb.cn/download?fileId=62b3ceb08e66a93f11a07...

oefrha• 2 years ago

In addition to the big jpeg linked in the sibling, [1] shows the photo of a pretty hefty tome being published in both Chinese and English. I found some Chinese online retailers carrying the Chinese version for about $400, but I can’t find the English version anywhere.

[1] https://english.cas.cn/newsroom/cas_media/202404/t20240422_6...

ConsiderCrying• 2 years ago

$400, damn. Although, to be fair, that book does look to be the size of a hefty fantasy trilogy. If the printing quality is up to snuff, it should be a gorgeous and very interesting read.

lithiumii• 2 years ago

Looks like it's 2 books, Geologic Atlas of the Lunar Globe and Map Quadrangles of the Geologic Atlas of the Moon.

keepamovin5• 2 years ago

First you make maps, then you profit. Normally by extracting some resources or energy from the area. China is following a classic path. The impetus for Artemis becomes more clear! Haha :)

pjc50• 2 years ago

Lunar resource extraction is unlikely to be viable for anything other than building on the moon - ever. The quantities of energy involved are simply too high.

powerapple2• 2 years ago

Imagine if we can send garbage to the moon and keep the earth clean, the ship returns with minerals.

lettergram• 2 years ago

I highly doubt that’s true, sending it back to earth is fairly cheap. Getting stuff to the moon can be expensive, but there will def be certain resources worth sending back. For instance, 10Kg of gold is worth $750k. Probably could just send that back with a few astronauts.

That’s not to include the possibility that there’s certain manufactured goods that could be cheaper or only possible to produce at lower gravity.

keepamovin5• 2 years ago

I thought the whole thing was He3 makes it viable.

zokier2• 2 years ago

As if NASA hasn't been making maps of space objects since the Apollo days or even earlier.

datavirtue• 2 years ago

Yeah, the plan is to snuff out the indigenous people there.

keepamovin5• 2 years ago

Hehehehe! :)

swiftcoder• 2 years ago

Does anyone know if the raw data behind these maps is available? I'd love the actual high-res elevation data for use in a moon simulator

JKCalhoun2• 2 years ago

I started with NASA's "CGI Moon Kit" [1] to do my little voxel-based moon game, Mooncraft2000.

Higher-resolution data would have been cool – but at some point the enormity of the data would probably mean I would have to stick to a small area of the Moon lest I fill my little server with tiles, ha ha.

I was also trying keep parity more or less between the resolution of the elevation data and image data since those voxels have a color in addition to an elevation. I suppose you could add noise to fake that though. (I did end up using Blender to pre-process the color data and bake in the shadows).

[1] https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4720

nekopa• 2 years ago

Great game BTW!

zokier2• 2 years ago

CNCA data: https://moon.bao.ac.cn/ce5web/moonGisMap.search

NASA data: https://imbrium.mit.edu/ (https://pgda.gsfc.nasa.gov/products/54), more generally https://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/dataserv/moon.html

JAXA data: https://darts.isas.jaxa.jp/planet/pdap/selene/index.html.en

sans_souse• 2 years ago

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/The_geol...

Figs2• 2 years ago

That's the one I mentioned before from 2022.

Note the date in the metadata: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_geologic_map_of_...

i.e. 15 June 2022

JKCalhoun2• 2 years ago

Being in the U.S., I am isolated from China and the zeitgeist of its people - but I'm getting little hints that the Moon may very well be in the forefront.

With this "mood", Chinese astronauts on the Moon seems inevitable now. And I don't say that with dread, it's just more of an awakening I am having to a future that I had not thought much about until very recently. I think in fact I look forward to it because I suppose I want a technological rival to also draw the U.S. back to the Moon.

I'm not sure why though. My child-brain has never even questioned the validity of pursuing space exploration. But I guess as I get old now and see the Earth itself heading into dangerous territory I can kind of understand the naysayers that may have not been as enthusiastic as I was as a kid about a future that follows a timeline similar to Kubrick's "2001".

pc862• 2 years ago

Imagine how different, and worse, the world would be had explorers not ventured across the sea just to see what was on the other side. We should explore for exploration's sake.

HideousKojima• 2 years ago

had explorers not ventured across the sea just to see what was on the other side

I mean, they mostly did it to establish trade routes and exploit previously untapped natural resources, not out of a mere spirit of exploration.

And even if the explorers themselves did it out of a spirit of exploration, the ones funding their expeditions generally had other motives.

Intralexical2• 2 years ago

The Iroquois had farms, you know. They grew corn and lived in a communal system where unused land was shared, but there was enough for everyone to have their own area as they wanted. Women had important roles in the labour force and political system. Famine was apparently quite rare, to the degree that the first Europeans across the pond were envious of their food security.

Down south, the Aztec capital was built in the middle of a lake, and had probably around as many people living in it as London, Paris, Venice, and Lisbon combined. The marketplace alone was around the size of a European capital. Tenochtitlan had aqueducts made out of terracotta, and the people bathed twice a day and drank spring water from a separate source. The palace had multiple zoos, gardens, and aquaria, and the nicer parts of the city were built entirely out of brick and masonry. The big temple in the middle was hundreds of feet tall, and only a couple meters shorter than Notre Dame in Paris.

Of course, all of that was destroyed, completely and utterly.

The myth of the romantic Age of Sail explorer is not compatible with the power structures of the time. What king would send perfectly good ships away "just to see what was on the other side", when there were political rivals to outcompete and usurp on this side? And what king would survive sending such resources away, if they did not gain a profit from doing so (through whatever tactics of exploitation were most expedient)?

Certainly the world would have been quite different if Columbus and Cortés decided to work on themselves, instead of concluding that the Earth is shaped like a tiny pear so they should raze a couple cities they just found out about, or whatever else was going on in those men's heads…

Isamu• 2 years ago

The Tiangong space station is seen as an important step towards manned moon missions.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station

contrarian12342• 2 years ago

This isn't authoritative in the slightest, but having lived in China I got a general feeling that Chinese see themselves as a third world country that's kinda backwards and trying it's best to catch up. This was my sense talking to normal people that sell noodles and whatnot. There is a kinda separate ultra nationalist crowd that probably see things different, but they don't really represent the majority. I think landing on the Moon is symbolic of that zeitgeist of "catching up" with the West and Japan

By contrast Indian colleagues seem extremely nationalistic - in a way that's a bit scary

dotnet004• 2 years ago

My impression as a not particularly nationalistic Indian is that most Indians also see India as a third world country that's kinda backwards and is trying to catch up, the problem is that they also get overly defensive when someone else implies something similar.

I've had so many people turn from crticizing every aspect of the country to arguing that India has all the quality of life, freedom and opportunity of a western country over the tiniest of comments from me.

aurareturn3• 2 years ago

When I visited China late last year, I spoke to the people there on what they thought about the US and the current trade war.

Almost everyone I spoke to said that they think the US is a very advanced country and admire the US. They have no interest in changing or influencing the US to be more like themselves. They see this trade war as just "what politicians do". They seem to have an understanding of why China is doing what it needs to do and why the US is doing what it needs to do. It's nothing personal for them.

In contrast, most Americans I've interacted with see China as more of an enemy, a sort of hateful resentment towards China, and ideologically incompatible with any of their own beliefs. It is much more personal for Americans. Americans want China to be more like themselves. It shows on HN comments as well.

bllguo2• 2 years ago

in the major cities at least, there is significantly growing awareness atp that domestic infrastructure, technology, etc. is simply better than in the west. people meme about western cities as being comparable to villages

however

1. they certainly do recognize areas where they are "behind". more interesting than technologies (ex. space, hn's new pet topic in semiconductors eyeroll, etc.) are things like recognizing mental health concerns and better working conditions

2. there are obviously still millions upon millions of people not in the major cities, for whom life has improved but clearly hasn't reached western standards

i dont think the spirit of what youre saying is wrong, but the inferiority complex youre implying is fading fast

dotnet004• 2 years ago

While it's inevitable that if China continues on its current trajectory, it'll eventually become the second nation to put people on the Moon on the back of its own tech, it still doesn't feel like their efforts are as heavily directed towards that goal yet. Even the US's poorly funded (besides SLS) and half-hearted (from Congress) Artemis program feels like an urgent rush to the Moon in comparison.

I wonder if these impressions are different for those less isolated from Chinese spaceflight efforts?

T-A2• 2 years ago

Are you aware of this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Lunar_Research_S...

throwaway199956• 2 years ago

Even it looks like they will be within weeks launching a second lunar sample return mission.

greenavocado2• 2 years ago

I can't wait for China to release photos of the location of the American landing on the moon.

surfingdino• 2 years ago

Be patient, it takes a while to get it done in ink.

downrightmike• 2 years ago

I'd say that the world has always been shit, and exploring is something humans always have done.

thomastjeffery• 2 years ago

Consider the diversity of the US population, and multiply by 4.

Hock88sdx• 2 years ago

This is China century. You should check out Chinese space station vs the American ISS. One day we will see it is Russian-Indian-Chinese doing the Star Trek. Kubricm's 2001 will be remade with corrected actual representation in future.

tpl• 2 years ago

Hopefully all this moon activity stays peaceful. What a complete failure combat on the moon would represent. Very interested in the Chinese mission to the South Pole of the Moon. Hopefully they find usable water.

DrNosferatu• 2 years ago

Is there a AVIF copy?

shrimp_emoji• 2 years ago

Did they scramble the coordinates for national security?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_geographic_d...

China’s Moon atlas is the most detailed ever made

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