Chinese Moon Probe Reaches New Deep Space Destination

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SPACE.com Staff

An artist's interpretation of the China's Chang'e 1 lunar orbiter, which launched in October 2007 and ended its mission by crashing into the moon on March 1, 2009.CREDIT: CNSA.

Several months after departing from the moon, a Chinese spacecraft has arrived at a new destination about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth, according to news reports in China.

The Chang'e 2 moon probe arrived at Lagrange Point 2 (L2) — a place where the gravity of Earth and the sun roughly balance out — on Aug. 25, the Xinhua news service reported Tuesday (Aug. 30). Chang'e 2 had left lunar orbit in early June to head for deeper space.

China is now the world's third nation or agency to put a probe in L2, one of five spots in near-Earth space that serve as a sort of parking lot for spacecraft to hover without being pulled toward any planetary body. NASA and the European Space Agency have also accomplished the feat.


Officials from China's State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) said that Chang'e 2 will carry out exploration activities around L2 over the coming year, Xinhua reported. SASTIND also plans to launch two "measure and control stations" into outer space by the end of 2012, and Chang'e 2 will be used to test the stations' functionality at that time.

Chang'e 2 launched on Oct. 1, 2010, and arrived in lunar orbit five days later. The probe is the second step in China's three-phase moon exploration program, which includes a series of unmanned missions to explore the lunar surface. [Photos: Our Changing Moon]

This photo, taken by China's Chang'e 2 lunar probe in October 2010, shows a crater in the moon's Bay of Rainbows. The image is one of the first released to the public by China's space agency.
CREDIT: China Lunar Exploration Program [Full Story] View full size image

During its time orbiting the moon, Chang'e 2 took a lot of high-resolution photos to help plan out future missions, which will actually drop hardware onto Earth's nearest neighbor. China is aiming to launch a moon rover around 2012, and another rover will land on the moon and return to Earth with lunar samples around 2017, according to Xinhua.

Chang'e 2 finished up its duties around the moon in April but had enough fuel left over that officials decided to send the probe off into deeper space.

The spacecraft's predecessor, Chang'e 1, launched in October 2007 and conducted a 16-month moon observation mission, after which it crash-landed on the lunar surface by design in March 2009.The Chang'e probes are named after the nation's mythical moon goddess.

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It's Education, Stupid !

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It’s that time of year when I spend much of my time reading the books that have been nominated for the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. It’s a judging duty that is both a pleasure and a pain. The pain is the sheer amount of time it takes to wade through thousands of pages.  The pleasure is reading books that would not necessarily cross my path. This year, as with the last, many of these books are written by economists and, understandably, focus on the state of the world economy. It is interesting to read how many agree that education and training are crucial to long-term economic success, for individuals, companies and countries. I made a similar argument in my most recent book The Shift, focusing in particular on the types of education and training that create specialization. Here are the two reasons why it has never been so critical to become educated:

• Rampaging connectivity – will see at least five billion people around the world using some form of mobile device to download information, access knowledge and coach and teach each other. Some will have the intellectual capacity and motivation to really make something of this extraordinary opportunity, wherever they happen to be born. These people will want to join the global talent pool and, if possible, migrate to creative and vibrant cities. By doing so, this vast crowd of talented people will increasingly compete with each other, continuously upping the stakes for what it takes to succeed.

• The technological revolution – brought mobile devices to billions, and is now transforming how work gets done. Robots are taking the place of unskilled and semi-skilled workers, while business analytics, modelling and collaborative technologies are taking away much of what has traditionally been the role of the middle manager. However, while technology may be replacing the mechanical aspects of work, it is not replacing the more complex, skilled work that involves creativity and innovation. That’s the high value piece that remains, and it is once that requires education and training. 

As high quality education becomes more of a premium, we can expect the sector to begin to transform itself even more rapidly. Just what this transformation will look like is difficult to predict with accuracy. But here are two emerging trends that I believe will shape it over the coming decades:

The Gutenberg Project: the race is on to digitalise many of the books and articles of the world, while the professors of academic institutions such as MIT are making their key lectures available on the web. Combined with hyper connectivity and the potentially global reach of the Cloud, this means that knowledge and wisdom will be available to anyone with access to the Internet. This could see the development of new ways of educating that leapfrog those of normal educational institutions, creating more fluid, virtual and vibrant networks of learning. 

Virtual Schools and Universities: there has been a great deal of research over the last decade focusing on how people learn. This has looked at e-learning, face-to-face teaching and over-the-phone coaching. What has become clear is that none of these on their own are the best; it’s the combination of all three that has the greatest impact. This is important for educational strategies since at least two of these processes are virtual, and F2F can largely be substituted by video conferencing. I saw the speed of this transformation recently when I visited UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) in Barcelona. Its sleek headquarters are the hub of a virtual university that has 60,000 students (and growing) taught by a faculty of over 3,000 virtual educators. Using simulations, games and collaborative environments, the institution is building deep expertise in supporting education across the world.

Some have argued that, of all the institutional forms, education has changed least over the past few decades. It looks as if the need for deeper knowledge and rapid advances in learning technologies may change all that.

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Can The U.S. Super Committee Solve The Debt Crisis?

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America’s relentlessly-escalating national debt seems like a problem that defies resolution. Congress and the Obama administration couldn’t solve it recently when they agreed to raise the U.S. debt ceiling by another $2.1 trillion.

see photosAFP/Getty ImagesClick for full photo gallery: 5 Ways The United States Can Get Out Of Debt

Instead of agreeing on measures to reduce the country’s staggering debt, Congress and the president handed off the problem to a so-called Super Committee. The 12-member, bipartisan committee of national legislators, with an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, will study U.S. finances and recommend $1.2 trillion in budget cuts by November 23. (Read more: “Can The U.S. Regain Its AAA Rating?“)

Reaching an Agreement If the committee reaches an agreement on budget cut proposals, Congress must vote approval on them by December 23. If Congress votes on them accordingly, the $1.2 trillion in cuts will go into effect. As usual, however, the issues will be what gets cut and by how much.

There are many items on the committee’s agenda for discussion, including: raising taxes, revamping the tax code, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, healthcare for the elderly and the federal retirement program; these are all major issues that have been long debated in Congress.

Also up for debate and possible reduction is the 35% U.S. corporate tax rate. Many Democrats and Republicans agree that the rate is too high relative to rates imposed in other countries. Democrats, however, have proposed plugging tax loopholes as a means of making up the difference in revenue if the corporate rate is lowered.

So the committee may have a difficult time finding ideas that everyone – including their constituents – can agree on. For example, another particularly controversial tax deduction that some legislators proposed eliminating is the home mortgage interest exemption. A USA Today/Gallup poll conducted this spring asked survey participants if they would approve eliminating that deduction if overall tax rates were also lowered. Sixty-one percent opposed the idea.



What if an Agreement Can’t be reached? In the event that the committee fails to reach an agreement, $1.2 trillion in budget cuts will be automatically imposed in equal amounts on domestic and defense spending.

With committee members divided equally along opposing political lines, many observers believe a stalemate is inevitable.

The 12 appointed members are:

• Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas (Republican and committee co-chair):  Chairman of the House Republican Conference.   


• Sen. Patty Murray of Washington (Democrat and committee co-chair):  She is a member of the Budget and Appropriations committees.


• Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland (Democrat): Van Hollen is the ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee.


• Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona (Republican): The number two ranking Republican in the Senate behind Mitch McConnell and a member of the Finance Committee.


• Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts (Democrat): A former presidential candidate in 2004 against incumbent George W. Bush, he is a member of the Finance Committee.  


• Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania (Republican): Elected to the Senate last year. Member of  the Senate Budget and Banking committees.


• Sen. Max Baucus of Montana (Democrat): Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee.  Also served on Obama’s debt commission.


• Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio (Republican): Former White House budget director in the Bush administration, and a member of Budget Committee.


• Rep. Xavier Becerra of California (Democrat): A senior member of the House Ways and Means Committee


• Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan (Republican): Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.   


• Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina (Democrat): The third-ranking Democrat in the House and a member of the Appropriations Committee.


• Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan (Republican): Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.  

Committee members reportedly will draw upon previously proposed solutions from Republican and Democratic legislators, independent groups, Obama’s 2010 bipartisan deficit commission, among others, as a basis for discussion.

The American public, eager for solutions and an end to partisan bickering, have nevertheless been warned by analysts and former policy makers not to expect too much from the committee.

Reaching an Agreement If the committee reaches agreement, as a political and practical matter, the suggestions are expected to be narrow in focus and likely to win Congressional approval, while the still nagging major issues will remain: long term taxes and entitlements.

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