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.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
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It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
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