The American space agency, NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
来源 :焚题库 2022-07-20
中问答题Is There Life on Mars?
The American space agency, NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), has drawn up a short list of ten research projects that will form the basic of an ambitious program to explore the planet Mars in a mission scheduled for launch in 2007. Scientists are being asked to use their ingenuity to devise novel ways to explore the red planet using intelligent robots and probes that might perhaps answer the biggest question of all-is there life on Mars?
NASA chose the ten projects from a list of 43 hopefuls. It has included missions for returning samples of Martian dust and gas to Earth, networks of small landers, orbiting constellations of microprobes and a rover that would try to date the precise age of rocks and soils. The ten "concepts" are part of the Mars Scout program to be launched in six years. This follows a decade of the most intensive interest in Mars since the two Viking probes of 1976 which sent back eerie images of the Martian landscape some 400 million kilometers away.
But the history of Mars exploration is littered with failore than half of the 30 missions to date have ended in fiasco. It was NASA’s announcement in August 1996 of possible signs of life
in a Martian meteorite which had fallen to Earth that rekindled intense interest in Earth’s nearest neighbor. It was assumed that liquid water had once flowed on Mars and an ancient atmosphere might have supported living organisms. However, opposing camps of scientists bitterly disputed NASA’s evidence for primitive life-forms in the Martian meteorite ALH84001. This led to the conclusion that the only way of finding out whether life ever existed on Mars is to go there and have a look.
NASA planned a bold series of increasingly complex missions involving the launch of a couple of space probes every year for a dozen years. One of the most successful so far was the shoe-box-sized So-journer rover which thrilled a world Internet audience when it was wheeled out in 1997. Since then, however, NASA has suffered a series of setbacks.
In September 1999 its Mars Climate Orbiter was lost as a failed rocket bum plunged it into the Martian atmosphere. NASA blamed it on one of its team using imperial units and another using metric. Three months later, NASA lost contact with its Polar Lander as it approached touchdown on the frozen South Pole of the planet. Space commentators muttered darkly about Mars being a cosmic equivalent of the Bermuda triangle.
The year of 2001 saw the successful completion of the Global Surveyor mission, an orbiting probe that took pictures of what some scientists say are channels in the dust where water may still occasionally flow from underground well. More recently, the Mars Odyssey probe was launched without hitch and is due to arrive in 2008.
Meanwhile, the European Space Agency is planning its own visit to the red planet with the launch of its Mars Express mission scheduled for take-off in June 2003. Britain is designated to take a lead role in the project with the Beagle 2 Lander, a small craft, the size of a kitchen sink designed to shuffle over the Martian landscape taking soil and rock samples, analyzing them for signs of life and transmitting the data back to Earth. Beagle 2framed after the ship that carded Charles Darwin on his voyage of discoverywill weigh just 60 kilograms and will cost about US $225,000 to build, a fraction of the cost of building the Viking space probes more than 25 years ago.
Beagle 2 will look for water, minerals and organic matter. Although it will reach Mars before NASA’s Scout mission is even launched, it will be considerably less sophisticated in tea’ms of analytical technology. The focus now for NASA is on what instruments and robots to put on the Mars Scout mission in six years. Ed Weiler, NASA’s associate administrator for space science, had to decide on a top ten to concentrate NASA’s limited resources.
Each project is to receive a grant of $150,000 to see them through the next six months of development. It all has to come out of a total project budget capped at $300 million. "These Scout concepts embody the spirit I first thought about more than a year ago; and will enable us to explore the diversity of Mars in new ways," Dr Weiler said.
The American space agency, NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration), has drawn up a short list of ten research projects that will form the basic of an ambitious program to explore the planet Mars in a mission scheduled for launch in 2007. Scientists are being asked to use their ingenuity to devise novel ways to explore the red planet using intelligent robots and probes that might perhaps answer the biggest question of all-is there life on Mars?
NASA chose the ten projects from a list of 43 hopefuls. It has included missions for returning samples of Martian dust and gas to Earth, networks of small landers, orbiting constellations of microprobes and a rover that would try to date the precise age of rocks and soils. The ten "concepts" are part of the Mars Scout program to be launched in six years. This follows a decade of the most intensive interest in Mars since the two Viking probes of 1976 which sent back eerie images of the Martian landscape some 400 million kilometers away.
But the history of Mars exploration is littered with failore than half of the 30 missions to date have ended in fiasco. It was NASA’s announcement in August 1996 of possible signs of life
in a Martian meteorite which had fallen to Earth that rekindled intense interest in Earth’s nearest neighbor. It was assumed that liquid water had once flowed on Mars and an ancient atmosphere might have supported living organisms. However, opposing camps of scientists bitterly disputed NASA’s evidence for primitive life-forms in the Martian meteorite ALH84001. This led to the conclusion that the only way of finding out whether life ever existed on Mars is to go there and have a look.
NASA planned a bold series of increasingly complex missions involving the launch of a couple of space probes every year for a dozen years. One of the most successful so far was the shoe-box-sized So-journer rover which thrilled a world Internet audience when it was wheeled out in 1997. Since then, however, NASA has suffered a series of setbacks.
In September 1999 its Mars Climate Orbiter was lost as a failed rocket bum plunged it into the Martian atmosphere. NASA blamed it on one of its team using imperial units and another using metric. Three months later, NASA lost contact with its Polar Lander as it approached touchdown on the frozen South Pole of the planet. Space commentators muttered darkly about Mars being a cosmic equivalent of the Bermuda triangle.
The year of 2001 saw the successful completion of the Global Surveyor mission, an orbiting probe that took pictures of what some scientists say are channels in the dust where water may still occasionally flow from underground well. More recently, the Mars Odyssey probe was launched without hitch and is due to arrive in 2008.
Meanwhile, the European Space Agency is planning its own visit to the red planet with the launch of its Mars Express mission scheduled for take-off in June 2003. Britain is designated to take a lead role in the project with the Beagle 2 Lander, a small craft, the size of a kitchen sink designed to shuffle over the Martian landscape taking soil and rock samples, analyzing them for signs of life and transmitting the data back to Earth. Beagle 2framed after the ship that carded Charles Darwin on his voyage of discoverywill weigh just 60 kilograms and will cost about US $225,000 to build, a fraction of the cost of building the Viking space probes more than 25 years ago.
Beagle 2 will look for water, minerals and organic matter. Although it will reach Mars before NASA’s Scout mission is even launched, it will be considerably less sophisticated in tea’ms of analytical technology. The focus now for NASA is on what instruments and robots to put on the Mars Scout mission in six years. Ed Weiler, NASA’s associate administrator for space science, had to decide on a top ten to concentrate NASA’s limited resources.
Each project is to receive a grant of $150,000 to see them through the next six months of development. It all has to come out of a total project budget capped at $300 million. "These Scout concepts embody the spirit I first thought about more than a year ago; and will enable us to explore the diversity of Mars in new ways," Dr Weiler said.
参考答案：
答案解析：
涉及考点
2022翻译三级笔译实务考试大纲
一、英译汉
9、科技发展类
