Four high school students who aspire to be physicists and information technology professionals celebrated yesterday after winning the "FORMOSAT-3 Creative Software Design Competition" hosted by the National Space Organization (NSPO).
The competition was part of the NSPO's education program to promote interest in and understanding of aerospace technology and FORMOSAT-3 in particular, National Science Council's Department of Science Education director Lin Chen-yung (林陳涌) said at the award ceremony.
"The competition attracted 35 high school and college teams, who spent an average of five months to design a software program that is both fun and educational," Lin said.
The FORMOSAT-3, a meteorology and climate satellite jointly developed by the NSPO and the University Corp for Atmospheric Research in the US, is part of the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate (COSMIC) project.
Launched in April last year, the satellite consists of six microsatellites each traveling in its own orbits 700km to 800km above the Earth.
The constellation serves two functions: while it receives day-to-day global climate information [updated every 90 minutes] transmitted by the 24 US Global Positioning System satellites, the system also tracks long-term global climate changes.
The competition winner, Taipei's Yucheng Senior High School team was made up of four 10th graders -- Ho Sung-yu (
The team won NT$125,000 in prize money.
The high-schoolers award-winning program, My Fun Satellite, is a flash video game that allows players to explore aspects of the satellite, the team's teacher Pan Kuan-chi (潘冠錡) said.
"Each of the five stages of the game focuses on a different mechanism or property of the satellite, from the amount of fuel required to carry the satellites to their designated orbits, to the angle and timing to successfully launch the microsatellites into six orbits," he said.
"There are two valuable things we got from the competition," said Yeh, the only young woman on the team.
"The immense amount of knowledge we gained from the five-month project, and our affirmation to major in physics or information technology in college," she said.
Meanwhile, the council held a separate press conference yesterday on the applications of molecular switches, saying that nanotechnology is a field that it will focus on in the future.
Molecular switches are molecules that can transform into two or more stable states according to different pH, temperature, or other properties, said Chiu Sheng-hsien (
One common application of the molecular switch is pH indicators, which display different colors on a paper strip depending on the pH level of the tested sample, he said.
"Synthetic molecular switches can be applied in a number of fields including nanotechnology [molecular computers] and biology," Chiu said.
Rotaxane, a molecule that has a mechanically-interlocking architecture consisting of a "macrocycle ring" trapped between the two ends of a "dumbbell-shaped" molecule, is one compound that scientists often work with to produce such switches, Chiu said.
He said that his team is working on applying rotaxane molecular switches to identifying biologically important ions, such as sodium and potassium which influence the osmotic balance between cells, in medical examinations.
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