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China’s Yutu rover recovers after cold lunar night, but glitch remains

Just in the past day or so, news had broken that the Chinese government had pronounced Yutu, their 'Jade Rabbit' moon rover, as officially dead. However, in a surprise twist, the rover actually seems to have made a recovery and is functioning again.

Yutu rolled out on it's mission to explore the moon's surface on December 15th, and had successfully gone through one of the two-week-long lunar nights shortly afterward. However, when the next lunar night came around near the end of January, the robot rover suffered a technical glitch that prevented it from folding down its camera mast and covering its internal workings from the harsh cold that would set in once the sun went down. With temperatures dropping to roughly 180 degrees below zero Celsius, it was expected that the rover just wouldn't be able to handle the cold.

[ Related: After only a month, China's moon rover may have broken down ]

When the sun finally rose over Yutu and Chang'e-3 — the lander that delivered it to the moon — it appeared as though the space agency's fears were confirmed. On Wednesday, it was reported by the Chinese state news agency Xinhua that the rover "could not be restored to full function on Monday as expected, and netizens mourned it on Weibo, China's Twitter-like service."

However, now, only a day after that, the rover appears to have defied the odds!

"Yutu has come back to life!" said Pei Zhaoyu, a spokesperson for the Chinese space agency, according to Xinhua.

"At first we were worried the rover could not withstand the low temperatures on the moon, because it entered its dormant state while in an abnormal state," Pei told Xinhua, according to BBC News. "But it is alive."

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Now that Yutu is back to work, it remains to be seen if the malfunction that caused the worries in the first place can be fixed. The Chinese space agency has nearly two weeks to figure out what the problem is and possibly resolve it, though. Even if the glitch persists, at least we've seen that the rover is capable of surviving the lunar night, even though it's apparently pretty groggy when it wakes up again. Hopefully, it can continue to operate for quite awhile longer, whether the problem is fixed or not.

For their part, the space agency is optimistic. As Pei Zhaoyu told Xinhua: "The rover stands a chance of being saved now that it is still alive."

(Photo courtesy: Wikipedia/CNSA)

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