Taiwan is to play a critical role in NASA’s Resource Prospector mission, which aims to be the first mining expedition on the moon in the early 2020s, and is expected to use a Taiwanese-made lunar lander to excavate water, oxygen and hydrogen.
The Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology is to build an uncrewed lunar lander to carry a rover to polar regions of the moon to mine resources, particularly subsurface water, international program director Han Kuo-chang (韓國璋) said.
The project is the first time Taiwan has participated in a NASA moon mission and it is hoped it will boost the nation’s visibility in the international aerospace industry.
“Taiwan has an outstanding ability to build electronic components and auxiliary systems for spacecraft, but the nation has had little opportunity to participate in space missions, so it has limited space flight history. The participation in NASA’s Resource Prospector mission might earn Taiwan a ticket into the aerospace industry supply chain,” Han said.
The institute is to deliver a lunar lander on a budget of about NT$1.5 billion (US$46.84 million).
It has to select and test commercially available parts that can function in space, where they would be exposed to extreme heat and radiation, Han said.
“It will be Taiwan’s first moon landing mission, and challenges involved in building a lunar lander include analyzing the orbit, controlling lander posture and velocity and landing the vehicle in the desired location where there is no air resistance and little atmospheric pressure. All those are very difficult,” he said.
However, the Resource Prospector mission is not the first time that the institute has worked on a NASA project.
It built the 1 tonne Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer for the International Space Station, which measures antimatter in cosmic rays and searches for evidence of dark matter.
The spectrometer has functioned uninterruptedly since 2011 in an environment where equipment can easily malfunction due to high daily temperature differentials and high-energy cosmic rays.
“The institute’s space computer is one of the most reliable NASA has ever had, which is why NASA chose to collaborate with Taiwan instead of South Korea in the moon-mining mission,” Han said.
The mission is aimed at reducing the cost of deep-space exploration by harvesting the basic building blocks of life and fuel, and generating the components in space.
NASA began exploring whether there was water on the moon in the 1990s and space missions have since proven its existence.
The Resource Prospector mission is to determine if the water can be extracted, Han said.
The rover is to explore polar regions of the moon and areas where sunlight does not reach, because it is believed that is where sub-surface water is most likely to be found.
The moon lander is expected to be completed by 2018 and the mission is expected to be launched in the early 2020s — if it is given the green light.
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
INTENSIFYING THREATS: Beijing’s tactics include massive attacks on the government service network, aircraft and naval vessel incursions and damaging undersea cables China is prepared to interfere in November’s nine-in-one local elections by launching massive attacks on the Taiwanese government’s service network (GSN), a report published by the National Security Bureau showed. The report was submitted to the Legislative Yuan ahead of the bureau’s scheduled briefing at the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee tomorrow. The national security team has identified about 13,000 suspicious Internet accounts and 860,000 disputed messages, the bureau said of China’s cognitive warfare against Taiwan. The disputed messages focus on major foreign affairs, national defense and economic issues, which were produced using generative artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed through Chinese
COUNTERING HOSTILITY: The draft bill would require the US to increase diplomatic pressure on China and would impose sanctions on those who sabotage undersea cable networks US lawmakers on Thursday introduced a bipartisan bill to bolster the resilience of Taiwan’s submarine cables to counter China’s hostile activities. The proposal, titled the critical undersea infrastructure resilience initiative act, was cosponsored by Republican representatives Mike Lawler and Greg Stanton, and Democratic Representative Dave Min. US Senators John Curtis and Jacky Rosen also introduced a companion bill in the US Senate, which has passed markup at the chamber’s Committee on Foreign Relations. The House’s version of the bill would prioritize the deployment of sensors to detect disruptions or potential sabotage in real-time and enhance early warning capabilities through global intelligence sharing frameworks,
RSS