NASA will confer a medal on an astronomy professor at National Central University (NCU) today in recognition of his achievements on a Saturn exploration space project.
Ip Wing-huen (葉永烜), a professor at NCU’s Graduate Institute of Astronomy, is an astronomer and one of the initiators of the Cassini-Huygens space mission, an international collaboration project involving NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency.
Ip, along with two others involved in the project, Daniel Gautier from the Observatoire Meudon and Toby Owen from the University of Hawaii, has been chosen to receive NASA’s Exceptional Public Service Medal, NCU said in a press release.
Ip’s daughter will accept the award on behalf of her father at a ceremony to be held at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, today, NCU said.
“Everyone has dreams, but realizing them is most important,” Ip said in the press release.
He said that it was because planetary science received scant attention in the early 1980s that a budding astronomer like himself was able to initiate the project.
Studying astronomy is a long path, he said, as he thanked his wife for her support during the time he was committed to the Cassini-Huygens project.
The US$3.26 billion Cassini-Huygens project was launched on Oct. 15, 1997, with the participation of 256 scientists from 18 countries. It is the second-biggest space mission next to the International Space Station program.
The mission comprises the NASA Cassini orbiter and the ESA Huygens probe, and is aimed at studying Saturn and its moons. The Huygens probe landed on Saturn’s moon Titan on Jan. 14, 2005, and began transmitting scientific data, which helped scientists in their study of the atmospheric structure of Titan and the origins of life on earth.
NASA announced on April 18 last year a two-year extension of the mission, known as the “Cassini Equinox mission,” because it seeks answers to new questions that arose from the first orbit of Saturn by the spacecraft Cassini.
Ip, who was born in Macau and was employed as the chief scientist at Taiwan’s National Space Organization in 1991, said investment in scientific research was crucial to sustainable development because it encourages scientific creativity.
“Back in the 1980s, there were only two Titan experts in Europe, but they were already planning to go to Titan. That was because Europe had hundreds of years of scientific development and historical heritage and could therefore invest in what seemed unachievable at the time,” he said.
ECHOVIRUS 11: The rate of enterovirus infections in northern Taiwan increased last week, with a four-year-old girl developing acute flaccid paralysis, the CDC said Two imported cases of chikungunya fever were reported last week, raising the total this year to 13 cases — the most for the same period in 18 years, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. The two cases were a Taiwanese and a foreign national who both arrived from Indonesia, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The 13 cases reported this year are the most for the same period since chikungunya was added to the list of notifiable communicable diseases in October 2007, she said, adding that all the cases this year were imported, including 11 from
Prosecutors in New Taipei City yesterday indicted 31 individuals affiliated with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) for allegedly forging thousands of signatures in recall campaigns targeting three Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers. The indictments stem from investigations launched earlier this year after DPP lawmakers Su Chiao-hui (蘇巧慧) and Lee Kuen-cheng (李坤城) filed criminal complaints accusing campaign organizers of submitting false signatures in recall petitions against them. According to the New Taipei District Prosecutors Office, a total of 2,566 forged recall proposal forms in the initial proposer petition were found during the probe. Among those
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) today condemned the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after the Czech officials confirmed that Chinese agents had surveilled Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) during her visit to Prague in March last year. Czech Military Intelligence director Petr Bartovsky yesterday said that Chinese operatives had attempted to create the conditions to carry out a demonstrative incident involving Hsiao, going as far as to plan a collision with her car. Hsiao was vice president-elect at the time. The MAC said that it has requested an explanation and demanded a public apology from Beijing. The CCP has repeatedly ignored the desires
The Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant’s license has expired and it cannot simply be restarted, the Executive Yuan said today, ahead of national debates on the nuclear power referendum. The No. 2 reactor at the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant in Pingtung County was disconnected from the nation’s power grid and completely shut down on May 17, the day its license expired. The government would prioritize people’s safety and conduct necessary evaluations and checks if there is a need to extend the service life of the reactor, Executive Yuan spokeswoman Michelle Lee (李慧芝) told a news conference. Lee said that the referendum would read: “Do
RSS