For so long time no any news and pics from rover, and now publishing pic from orbiter with rover just beside lander. After rover went few meters from lander, there were no more pics for so long time... Is it possible that they maybe lost control over rover??
Or maybe they are collecting and saving pics and data for 100th anniversary celebration of CCP to publish it all in big maner?
It could be. But most likely no. It is working fine. It just science and engineering thats limiting data transmission.
1.) Remember this is China's first time going to Mars. So only 1 Chinese orbiter is out there versus at least 3 for US.
2.) These orbiters circles mars at very high speed. The time window the orbiter and the lander or rover have line of sight with each other is very limited. Maybe less than 30 minutes data transmission and probably cannot very be more than an hour.
3.) The ave distance between mars and earth is 300M km+. So that means the signal to noise ratio is very small which translates to very slow data transmission speed. The farther the radio signal is away from earth, the signal becomes very weak, remember the high school inverse of the square of distance. This is the limiting factor of those deep space missions. Definitely not a wifi speed like we have at home.
4.) Lastly there are few earth ground stations that receives those Chinese mars signals. I think some in China and one in Chile. So taking account the rotation of earth and rotation of mars, there is also a time window needed for the singal to align with the mars orbiter and earth stations.
So we see, the CNSA is very selective what picture or data to send from mars to earth. Definitely we dont get a tiktok quality video. Most likely gray pictures, with one picture or two per day.
It is just an engineering challenge to send something 1 mars away.
