When NASA’s Perseverance rover touched down on the surface of Mars on Thursday after a seven-month journey, a Taiwan-born engineer was preparing to guide its first movements on the Red Planet.
Yen Cheng (嚴正), a 61-year-old graduate of National Tsing Hua University and a 20-year veteran at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is taking part in his fourth Mars exploration mission with the agency’s Robot Interfaces and Visualization team, this time as its leader.
Yen in a media interview described his expectations for the next few months as “living on Earth in Mars time.”
Photo: Reuters/NASA/JPL-Caltech
As nighttime temperatures on Mars can drop to minus-80°C, the rover must spend those periods heating itself, while conducting research during the day, he said.
Yen and his team would use the downtime to prepare the code that would guide the rover’s movements the next day, he said.
However, as a Martian day is about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day, the time difference results in a shifting work schedule.
“Today my shift started at 2pm. Next week it will start at 10pm,” Yen said.
He said that piloting the 1-tonne rover is nothing like driving a remote-controlled vehicle, despite expectations to the contrary.
As there is no GPS on Mars, Yen and his team had to design custom navigation software for the rover, using technologies such as 3D visualization and virtual and augmented reality.
These efforts, multiplied across other teams contributing to the mission, mean that every meter the rover covers on Mars is the product of “decades of work by countless people,” he said.
One of the main missions of the Perseverance rover is to search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.
Asked if NASA has guidelines on what to do if the rover encounters alien life, Yen said it did not, but joked that his first instinct would be to take a picture.
However, NASA followed strict procedures to prevent Earth organisms from hitching a ride to Mars, due to their potential to corrupt scientific research and result in a false discovery of life on the Red Planet.
Asked how long it would take before a human mission could reach Mars, Yen said he believes that children born this year could see it during their lifetime, adding that the technology needed to launch a human mission to Mars already exists.
It is just a matter of investing the money, which would be “hundreds of times” more than the US$2.7 billion price tag for the Perseverance mission, he added.
While the goal remains distant, Yen said he was amazed by the progress that has been achieved during his own time at NASA, including the discovery that liquid water once existed on Mars and now searching for evidence of life on the Red Planet.
Yen advised young Taiwanese interested in astronautics not to be afraid to pursue their dreams, citing his own mid-career decision to leave a professorship for an opportunity at NASA.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods