The National Geographic Channel will will broadcast globally a feature-length special about the Mars exploration rovers on Sunday, Jan 11 at 9pm. The program will feature never-before-seen footage of the mission's preparation and, if all goes to plan, groundbreaking pictures from Mars itself.
Launched toward Mars in June and July this year, the two golf cart-sized rovers named Spirit and Opportunity, will touch down in early January as part of an on-going NASA mission to determine whether or not the planetary environment of Mars can, or ever did, support life.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CHANNEL
Managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of California's Institute of Technology for NASA's Office of Space Science, the Mars Exploration Rover project is much larger than 1997's Mars Pathfinder and scientists hope to gather more information than ever before about the Red Planet.
The first rover to land on the planet's surface will be Spirit, which will land on Jan. 3 near the center of the Gusev Crater, a place where NASA scientists believe there may have once been a giant lake. Then, three weeks later Opportunity will touch down at the Meridiani Planum, a region that contains huge deposits of exposed mineral that could have been formed under watery conditions.
Landing, however, is only the first step in the three-month Mars exploration project. It will take a week for each rover to unfold itself, rise to its full height and begin scanning its surroundings. Using images and measurements that they will receive daily from the rovers, scientists will command the vehicles to travel to rocks and soil targets of interest to evaluate their composition and texture on microscopic scales.
During their 12 weeks of activity each rover is expected to traverse an area the size of 10 soccer pitches.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
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Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located