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So, basically a suicide mission.
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I would think you are right, and that they did think of those things, or would have, if this was meant as something other than a publicity stunt. Which is all I think this is, and to a resounding success.
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Obviously the blood wolf did it.
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The lander and rover both have radiothermal heaters, but the biology experiment was a self-contained add on designed by students.
Both the stationary lander and Yutu-2 rover are equipped with a radioisotope heater unit (RHU) in order to heat their subsystems during the long lunar nights,
The canister was a popular science experiment, selected from proposals submitted to a contest that invited students to design a small payload for the lander, and thus of less importance than the main science goals of the mission. It was one of a number of outreach initiatives related to the Chang’e-4 mission,
The Chang-e 4 lander and rover were originally spare Chang-e 3 hardware. Some mods were made, obviously, especially with an eye to improving the rover’s longevity, but building in a heat pipe from the heat source to the student-designed terrarium evidently did not make the cut.
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If the plant was heated and didn’t freeze to death how long would it have lasted without replacing the oxygen it produced with co2?
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I hope they send a battery up when they do the manned mission.
Cotton murderin’ Commie bastards. It’s Komarov all over again.
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Just like the beans I used to put in a “bed”, made with some cotton
balls, to germinate when I was a school kid. It was cool. I was a kind of Farmer growing black beans in a saucer at school.
Actually, the pivot back toward the moon and away from Mars as the next immediate goal is rather recent, and has two proximate causes: (1) the recent discovery (2008-2009) that lunar polar craters do, in fact, harbor substantial quantities of water – long theorized, but only recently proven.
And (2) Donald Trump’s desire to have a “space spectacular” that could be accomplished during his term of office (assuming he’s re-elected: he wanted a first-term Triumph in time for his re-election campaign, but there’s just not enough lead time).
The presence of water makes the moon a potentially-valuable resource, as it could be mined for water, breathable oxygen, and hydrogen/oxygen rocket propellant.
(And though this gets surprisingly little press, a “space elevator” from the lunar surface to the Earth-Moon L1 or L2 points is doable with existing technology. The low gravity and absence of atmosphere make it far easier than an Earth-geosync elevator. No magic future nano-something-or-other materials required.)
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Once I put a very old plant into a 3-season room with a heater unit. At some point during the winter, the heater stopped working and the plant froze. A few months later, I was about to throw away the pot and noticed new growth sprouting in the soil. It’s been about 10 years since that incident, and Phil the Second has been growing well ever since. I learned my lesson, and never put a plant in that room again.
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Exactly what it did. This was not a malfunction or an unexpected result.
It was a student experiment designed to demonstrate germination in a low-G cosmically-irradiated environment. Nothing more.
What they actually learned is rather interesting, but everyone’s too busy getting worked up over the plants freezing to pay attention to the actual science.
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Now, now. There you go spoiling everyone’s fun with dull, dry facts. 
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They didn’t learn anything except that they pulled off an interesting publicity stunt. We already knew from experiments on the ISS that plants can germinate in a microgravity environment outside the atmosphere. The seedling was germinated in Earth soil sent to the moon, not Lunar soil. Any water involved came from Earth. The air inside the box came from Earth. The only way the moon was involved was to be a floor under the box that held the seedling. And they used a type of plant which has near-zero utility for a moon colony; you can’t eat cotton. This was nothing.
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Um, but “microgravity outside the atmosphere” is not the same as “fractional gravity under farside lunar irradiation.”
And it’s not a question of “can seeds germinate?”, but rather, “How does this particular environment affect germination?” (And it did, and did so differently than ISS-based experiments, so: science!)
But, yeah, it was primarily a publicity stunt. A pretty effective one, too.
Neither one of those is “nothing.”
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Nah. There are good reasons for doing things that don’t have immediate or direct benefits; that’s quite different from pointing out there aren’t any conceivable benefits at all right now. Right now, the whole narrative around Moon bases is one that’s desperately trying to invent a reason for a Moon base. (E.g. the whole ‘He-3 mining’ thing, which isn’t even bullshit)
Sure, me too. Micro-gravity environments are very useful, scientifically, for example, so there’s a compelling reason to have bases in space. But unless someone has an idea about how a Moon base would actually contribute to that, rather than just being an expectation that we have (and we’re not even quite sure why we have it)…
My stash of cheese, obviously. Hands off.
Yep. But that’s not a Moon base. The opposite, in fact, as a Moon base works contrary to that purpose, creating the noise that a radio telescope is trying to escape in the first place.
It’s always been there, to one degree or another. Water would be a good reason, but the direct evidence of ice was only this last year (and we still don’t know if there’s enough to be useful, so it’s several steps premature to be discussing bases, which wouldn’t be an end to themselves). Whereas I’ve seen discussions of Moon bases going back to at least the '90s (there was an enthusiasm under George W), with no coherent reason given for having a base there - the idea of He-3 mining was sometimes pushed, even though it’s multiple levels of nonsense, indicating a certain desperation to come up with a justification.
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Kamikaze cotton?
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Whew, that was close.
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What did they learn?
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Why to send a space heater of course! 
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