Sharmila is a Seattle-based science journalist. She found her love for astronomy in Carl Sagan's The Pale Blue Dot and has been hooked ever since. She holds an MA in Journalism from Northeastern University and has been a contributing writer for Astronomy Magazine since 2017. Follow her on Twitter at @skuthunur.
or polonium into electrical power. This process ultimately warms spacecraft hardware, though mostly just enough to help it survive very cold temperatures.Weighing the chancesLunokhod 1, which was the first successful lunar rover that covered over 10 kilometers in just 10 months, had powered itself using solar cells mounted on a large lid. During nights on, it closed that lid to keep itself warm until the next sunrise with the energy supplied by a polonium-210 radioisotope heater.
China's Chang'e-3 lander and rover duo, which landed not too far off from Lunokhod 1's site in a large crater on the northwest part of the moon in 2013, had similar mechanisms onboard to protect it from bitter lunar nights. The rover, Yutu, survived the first night but permanently
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