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Comment by ChemSpider | Hacker News Reader

The touchdown was three (earth) days ago. I am surprised that so far _nothing_ has happened. No image or data published?

Is that normal or the sign of not-yet-admitted problems?

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If this was NASA, the silence would be an ominous sign. NASA (JPL) typically sends back a picture ASAP because they live stream the whole event and know the world is watching. NASA loves press, and is very good at it. Unsurprisingly, China is being much more secretive. I don't think three days of silence is indicative of anything. This is their first rover. I'm sure they're taking their time. If a few weeks from now we still haven't received pictures or data, I'll start to suspect a failure.

> Unsurprisingly, China is being much more secretive.

But why?

Do you really need an explanation on why China historically doesn't like to share data?

About the success of their mars mission? Yeah?

I do. These are obviously "prestige programs" (well really duplicating a pervious iteration of the US space program).

I'm curious why they wouldn't release data on day one, unless something went wrong and they are trying to save face.

> Unsurprisingly, China is being much more secretive. I don't think three days of silence is indicative of anything. This is their first rover.

This. Mars missions have a very high probability of failure.

Nobody in China is going to get a huge benefit from livestreaming the success but they would get a huge downside for livestreaming the failure.

Pics or it didn't happen [0].

https://www.rocketlabusa.com/missions/completed-missions/pic...

Dumb expression. CGI is cheap and easy. A Mars rover is easy to detect by other nation-states.

Rather sure the intelligence agencies know. They would just scan the spectrum looking for communications from Mars.

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