TAIPEI: The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will award astronomer Ip Wing-huen a medal today, in recognition of his achievements on a Saturn exploration space project.

Ip, a professor at National Central University (NCU)'s Graduate Institute of Astronomy, is internationally renowned and one of the initiators of the "Cassini-Huygens" space mission, an international collaboration involving NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI).

Ip has been chosen to receive NASA's Exceptional Public Service Medal, along with two other initiators of the project, Daniel Gautier from the Observatoire Meudon and Toby Owen from the University of Hawaii.

Ip's daughter Anita Ip will accept the award on behalf of her father at an award ceremony to be held at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, NCU added.

"Everyone has dreams but realizing them is most important," Ip said in the press release.

He said that it is because planetary science received scant attention in the early 1980s that a budding astronomer like him was able to initiate the project. Studying astronomy is a long path, he said, as he thanked his wife for her full support during the time he was committed to the Cassini project.

The $3.26 billion Cassini-Huygens project was launched on Oct 15, 1997 with the participation of 256 scientists from 18 countries and regions.

It is the second largest space mission next to the International Space Station program.

The mission is composed of two elements, the NASA Cassini orbiter and the ESA Huygens probe, and is aimed at studying the planet Saturn and its moons. The Huygens probe landed on Saturn's moon Titan Jan 14, 2005 and began transmitting scientific data, which helped scientists in their study of not only the atmospheric structure of Titan, but also of the origin of life on earth.

NASA announced on April 18, 2008 a two-year extension of the exploration, which is called the "Cassini Equinox mission", as it is seeking answers to new questions that arose from the first orbit of Saturn by the spacecraft Cassini.

Ip, who was born in Macao and was employed as the chief scientist at Taiwan's "National Space Organization" in 1991, said that investment in scientific research is crucial to social sustainable development, as this encourages scientific creativity in a country.

"Back in the 1980s, there were only two Titan experts in Europe, but they were already planning to go to Titan. That was because Europe had hundreds of years of scientific development and historical heritage and could therefore invest in what seemed unachievable at the time," he said.

Ip is now heading a project to build what is called the Lulin Two-meter Telescope at Lulin Observatory in the Yushan National Park in central Taiwan. The project will allow greater participation by Taiwanese scientists in major international astronomical projects, he said.

China Daily/CNA

(HK Edition 06/09/2009 page2)