Wan Weixing

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Wan Weixing ( Chinese  萬 衛星  /  万 卫星 , Pinyin Wàn Wèixīng , born  July 1, 1958 in Tianmen ; †  May 20, 2020 in Beijing ) was a Chinese astrophysicist and politician of the Society of September 3 . From 2016 until his death in 2020 he was chief scientist of the Mars program of the People's Republic of China .

Youth and Studies

Wan Weixing was born on July 1, 1958, the youngest of four children of a farming family in what was then Tianmen County in central Hubei . His father died when he was little. From then on, his mother had to raise him and his three sisters alone, and the people's communes' childcare system proved very helpful. In 1966, when he was still attending elementary school, the Cultural Revolution broke out, and for several years there were no regular classes in Chinese schools. Wan Weixing made do with “self-study” and, in the absence of school books, read other material, with books on mathematics and physics being more accessible than literature on humanities subjects for ideological reasons. He was fortunate that teachers at his school often took advantage of the scope for senior officials and gave private tutoring.

When the Abitur examinations were resumed in 1977 , he was among the first class to take a regular Abitur (previously admission to universities was based on recommendations based on political reliability). In 1978 he began studying at the Institute of Astrophysics (空间 物理系) at Wuhan University . After graduating in 1982, Wan Weixing moved to what was then the Institute for Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Wuhan (中国科学院 武汉 物理 研究所), where he studied astrophysics with a focus on ionospheric physics with Li Jun (李钧, 1930–1994) at the graduate school . In 1984 he obtained the degree of a physicist there, and in 1989 he received his doctorate with a thesis on disturbances in the ionosphere.

Ionospheric research

After completing his doctorate, Wan Weixing initially worked as an assistant at the Physics Institute. From October 1990 to July 1991 he was a visiting scientist at the Center for Atmospheric Research, University of Massachusetts Lowell , where he together with Bodo Reinisch with the developed at that center Ionosonde - examined ionospheric disturbances - the so-called "Digisonde". After returning to Wuhan, he was initially an assistant for a while until he was promoted to Science Council with the rank of professor (研究员) and head of the laboratory for ionospheric physics (电离 层 物理 研究室) in 1994. When the Chinese Academy of Sciences carried out a major reorganization in 2004, Wan Weixing and the staff of his laboratory moved to Beijing, where they worked as the "Laboratory for Earth Magnetism and Astrophysics" (地磁 与 空间 物理 研究室) in the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The institute, headed at the time by the geologist Ding Zhongli (丁仲礼, * 1957) and his deputy and later successor, the geophysicist Zhu Rixiang (朱 日 祥, * 1955), was still very traditional at the time. Zhao Jiuzhang , 1950–1968 the first director of the institute, had already taught high-atmosphere physics and had also promoted practical research in this area with the T-7 sounding rocket . In the early 2000s, however, the institute concentrated on solid earth physics . At the request of the institute's board of directors, the Wuhan group now introduced aeronomy as a new focus .

In addition to basic research on the origin of the geomagnetic field and its polarity reversal , the laboratory focused on the effects of solar and interplanetary factors on the magnetosphere , the ionosphere, the high atmosphere and the geomagnetic field, i.e. the so-called " space weather ". For this purpose, there were three working groups at the laboratory: "Geomagnetism and Space Weather", "Space Weather in the Ionosphere" and the largest working group "Ionosphere and High Atmospheric Physics" headed by Wan Weixing and with 12 other scientists.

Through observations with a Doppler radar , Wan Weixing and his colleagues had already found out in Wuhan that the migratory disturbances in the ionosphere over China were related to the topography of the Qinghai-Tibet plateau and the high altitude lows in the troposphere , an approach they used now followed up with the analysis of data provided by the GPS network and ionoprobes for southern China and North America. By evaluating more than 2.6 million data sets that the Taiwanese FORMOSAT-3 satellites had collected about the vertical structure of the ionosphere, a doctoral student in the laboratory was able to find strong evidence in 2011 that the four out of four at a distance of 90 Longitude waves distributed around the earth, the existing plasma density structure in the equatorial ionosphere is coupled to the tidal wind, a problem that the two ionosphere working groups had been dealing with since 2008.

Another important project by Wan Weixing was the construction of the Sanya Incoherent Scatter Radar (SYISR) in the south of the island of Hainan , which was used as part of the Meridian Project for observing space weather - similar to the Millstone radar of the MIT Haystack Observatory - in Altitudes between 50 and 6000 km, i.e. up to the Van Allen Belt , the electron density and temperature as well as the ion density, temperature and speed can be measured. When Wan Weixing died in May 2020, the radar system was about to be completed.

Planetology

In 2008, the Laboratory for Earth Magnetism and Astrophysics, together with the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, developed a concept for exploring the ionosphere of Mars with the Yinghuo-1 probe , which was originally scheduled to start in October 2009. Similar to the FORMOSAT-3 satellites, two similar plasma sensors on the Chinese probe and the Russian Fobos-Grunt , the main probe of the mission, should monitor the signal change when a probe disappears below the horizon, the so-called " radio occultation " vertical electron density profile of the Martian ionosphere. Yinghuo-1 also had a device with which the energy spectrum of electrons and ions in the high atmosphere of Mars could be measured, as well as their distribution in space. In addition, this device, which was developed by the Center for Space Science and Applied Research at the time , was used to identify the ions based on their mass. Wu Ji , the then director of the Center for Space Science, was also the chief scientist (首席 科学家) of the Mars mission. After the original start date was postponed, the two probes finally took off on November 8, 2011, but then could not reach the transfer orbit to Mars and burned up in the Earth's atmosphere on January 15, 2012.

As early as 2010, the Academy of Sciences proposed to the National Defense Agency for Science, Technology and Industry to launch its own purely Chinese Martian program . Preparations for this soon began, but it was not until January 11, 2016 that Prime Minister Li Keqiang released the corresponding funds from the Fund for National Scientific and Technical Large-scale Projects . Now Wan Weixing has been appointed chief scientist of the Mars program. First he contacted universities and research institutions of the Academy of Sciences and began to define the scientific goals of the mission scheduled for 2020, in which a rover was to be used in addition to an orbiter. In spring 2017, a conference was held to which Wan Weixing had invited not only the scientists but also a delegation of engineers led by Zhang Rongqiao , the technical director of the Mars program. Together they worked out which devices could realistically be built into the orbiter and rover in order to achieve the desired goals.

In addition to geological investigations, both from orbit and by means of the rover, the focus of Tianwen-1, similar to the previous mission, was placed on researching the ionosphere, space weather and surface weather of Mars. Unlike Earth, Mars no longer has a global magnetic field with a north and south pole, but only weak local magnetic fields. As a result, the planet does not have a radiation belt, such as the Earth's Van Allen Belt , which would protect its surface from high-energy electrons from space. To investigate these things, the orbiter is equipped with particle detectors, there are devices on both the orbiter and the rover to measure the magnetic field, and the rover has a weather station to measure temperature, air pressure and wind.

The Chinese Geophysical Society had been studying alien planets since the early 2000s. In 2016, a commission for planetology (行星 物理 专业 委员会) was set up there, chaired by Wan Weixing; in the board elections on October 14, 2017, he was elected Secretary General (常务副 理事长) of the Geophysical Society. In this capacity, he worked out a long-term plan for exploring the solar system beyond Mars, with missions to Mercury, Venus, Jupiter and the asteroids. For a flyby of Jupiter's moon Ganymede and a combined mission to the near-Earth asteroid (469219) Kamoʻoalewa and the main belt comet (7968) Elst-Pizarro, there are now developed concepts that were submitted to the State Council of the People's Republic of China for approval in April 2020 .

At the Institute for Geology and Geophysics of the Academy of Sciences, the Laboratory for Geomagnetism and Astrophysics was renamed on June 27, 2017 to the “Focus Laboratory for Geophysics and Planetary Astrophysics” (地球 与 行星 物理 重点 实验室), still under the direction of Wan Weixing, but with a larger scope. In addition to the original working groups: "Geomagnetism and Space Weather", "Space Weather in the Ionosphere" and "Ionosphere and High Atmospheric Physics" (now headed by his former doctoral student Le Xin'an), the new focus laboratory now includes the working groups "Earth Magnetic Field and Biosphere Evolution " , " Seismology ", "Comparative Planetology", "Inner Structure of the Earth", "Inner Structure of the Planets" and "Planetary Astrophysics" (directed by his former PhD student Wei Yong).

Political commitment

In 1992 Wan Weixing joined the “ Society of September 3rd ”, a political party whose members are mainly recruited from the academic middle and upper levels and whose official motto is “Patriotism, Democracy, Science” (爱国 ， 民主 ， 科学) . From 1998 to 2008 he sat as a representative of the party in the Standing Committee of the Political Consultative Conference of Hubei Province (中国 人民 政治协商会议 湖北省 委员会 常务委员会), in 2002 he became deputy chairman of the Hubei National Association of the Society of September 3 (湖北省 第四届 委员会 副 主委). In June 2012 he was elected to the board of the regional association Beijing (北京市 第十二届 委员会), in December of that year to the central committee of the party. In the parliamentary elections in December 2012 / January 2013, Wan Weixing was elected to the National People's Congress in his home constituency of Hubei , and five years later he was re-elected - again in Hubei. In total, the September 3rd Society won 64 of 2980 seats in parliament in that election. On March 18th, 2018, at the constituent session of the newly elected parliament, Wan Weixing was elected as one of 5 representatives of the Society of September 3rd to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, the "core parliament" of the People's Republic of China where the actual legislation takes place.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e 李晨阳 、 丁 佳: 追忆！ 你 所 不 知道 的 “火星 院士” 万 卫星. In: news.sciencenet.cn. June 1, 2020, accessed June 2, 2020 (Chinese).
  2. ↑ 贺 俊 、 罗欣: 火星 计划 首席 科学家 万 卫星: 探测 火星 就是 探索 地球 的 未来. In: k.sina.cn. June 14, 2017, accessed June 2, 2020 (Chinese).
  3. ↑ 万 卫星. In: 93.gov.cn. May 25, 2018, accessed June 4, 2020 (Chinese).
  4. ↑ 杨少 同: 武 大 校友 万 卫星 院士 母校 行. In: news.whu.edu.cn. March 16, 2012, accessed May 31, 2020 (Chinese).
  5. ↑ 单位 简介. In: wipm.cas.cn. Retrieved June 1, 2020 (Chinese).
  6. ↑ 万 卫星: 扰动 电离 层 广义 射线 理论 与 电离 层 扰动 的 高频 反演. In: nlc.cn. Retrieved June 5, 2020 (Chinese).
  7. ↑ Bodo Reinisch. In: uml.edu. Retrieved July 16, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Wei Yong: Weixing Wan (万 卫星). In: nature.com. Retrieved June 15, 2020 .
  9. ↑ Overview. In: english.igg.cas.cn. Retrieved June 2, 2020 .
  10. ↑ 历任 所长. In: igg.cas.cn. Retrieved June 2, 2020 (Chinese).
  11. ↑ 地磁 与 空间 物理 研究室. In: igg.cas.cn. Retrieved June 1, 2020 (Chinese).
  12. ^ Wan Weixing et al .: Traveling ionospheric disturbances associated with the tropospheric vortexes around Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. In: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com. October 15, 1998, accessed June 1, 2020 .
  13. ^ Wan Weixing et al .: Observations of poleward-propagating large-scale traveling ionospheric disturbances in southern China. In: ann-geophys.net. February 28, 2013, accessed June 1, 2020 .
  14. ↑ 万 卫星 et al .: 磁暴 期间 大 尺度 电离 层 行进 式 扰动 在 美洲 扇区 的 GPS 网 观测. In: rhhz.net. February 6, 2016, accessed June 1, 2020 (Chinese).
  15. ↑ He Maosheng, Wan Weixing et al .: Strong evidence for couplings between the ionospheric wave ‐ 4 structure and atmospheric tides. In: agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com. July 16, 2011, accessed June 1, 2020 .
  16. ↑ 地质 地球 所 电离 层 经 向 四 波 结构 与 大气 潮汐 耦合 研究 新 发现. In: cas.cn. September 9, 2011, accessed June 1, 2020 (Chinese).
  17. ↑ 万 卫星 et al .: 十大 科技 成果 —— 电离 层 经度 四 波 结构 研究. In: igg.cas.cn. January 12, 2011, accessed June 1, 2020 (Chinese).
  18. ↑ 赵秀 宽 、 宁 百 齐: 面向 大 数据 的 日 地 科学 数据 共享 服务. Retrieved June 2, 2020 (Chinese). P. 30f.
  19. ↑ Hong Xiaoyu et al .: Brief Introduction about Chinese Martian Mission Yinghuo-1. In: lpi.usra.edu. Retrieved June 3, 2020 .
  20. ↑ Zhao Hua: “Yinghuo-1” - Martian Space Environment Exploration Orbiter. In: meetingorganizer.copernicus.org. Retrieved June 3, 2020 .
  21. ↑ 萤火 一号 在 俄 发射 我国 首颗 火星 探测器 踏上 征程. In: cssar.cas.cn. November 9, 2011, accessed June 3, 2020 (Chinese).
  22. ↑ Phobos-Grunt mission. In: russianspaceweb.com. Retrieved June 3, 2020 .
  23. ↑ 张荣 桥 ： 仰望 星空 脚踏实地. In: hsxfw.gov.cn. February 27, 2019, accessed June 5, 2020 (Chinese).
  24. ↑ 耿 言 et al .: 我国 首次 火星 探测 任务. In: jdse.bit.edu.cn. June 28, 2018, accessed June 4, 2020 (Chinese).
  25. ↑ 黄金 水: 金星 内部 的 对流 与 表面 更新. In: gb.oversea.cnki.net. October 10, 2009, accessed June 4, 2020 (Chinese).
  26. ↑ 中国 地球物理 学会 会 讯 第 140 期 （第 139 期 增刊）. In: cgscgs.org.cn. October 14, 2017, accessed June 4, 2020 (Chinese).
  27. ↑ 万 卫星 et al .: 从 深 空 探测 大 国 迈向 行星 科学 强国. In: zhishifenzi.com. May 28, 2020, accessed June 4, 2020 (Chinese).
  28. ↑ 倪伟: 中国 火星 探测 命名 “天 问 一号” ， 透露 一项 更 长远 太空 计划. In: bjnews.com.cn. April 24, 2020, accessed June 4, 2020 (Chinese).
  29. ↑ 地磁 与 空间 物理 研究室. In: igg.cas.cn. Retrieved June 5, 2020 (Chinese).
  30. ↑ 地球 与 行星 物理 重点 实验室. In: igg.cas.cn. June 16, 2017, accessed June 5, 2020 (Chinese).
  31. ↑ 万 卫星. In: 93.gov.cn. March 19, 2018, accessed June 4, 2020 (Chinese).
  32. ↑ 王 砚 文: 九三学社 北京市 第十二 次 代表 大会 闭幕. In: news.cntv.cn. June 24, 2012, accessed June 4, 2020 (Chinese).
  33. ↑ 九三学社 第十 三届 中央 委员会. In: 93.gov.cn. December 7, 2017, accessed June 4, 2020 (Chinese).
  34. ↑ 中华人民共和国 第十二届 全国 人民 代表 大会 代表 名单. In: npc.gov.cn. July 24, 2013, accessed June 5, 2020 (Chinese).
  35. ↑ 刘淼: 中华人民共和国 第十 三届 全国 人民 代表 大会 代表 名单. In: gov.cn. February 24, 2018, accessed June 5, 2020 (Chinese).
  36. ↑ 侯 强: （两会 受权 发布） 中华人民共和国 全国 人民 代表 大会 公告 （第五 号）. In: xinhuanet.com. March 19, 2018, accessed June 5, 2020 (Chinese).
  37. ↑ The General Assembly of the National People's Congress, which is usually held in March every year, usually only votes on proposals that have already been formulated in the Standing Committee in such a way that they have a majority. An exception is, for example, a strategy paper by the State Commission for Development and Reform , which was heavily discussed in May 2020 at the 3rd General Assembly of the 13th legislative period and changed several times. 刘晓莹: 发改委 将 出台 新 基建 政策 ： 实施 全国 一体化 大 数据中心 建设. In: farennews.com. June 1, 2020, accessed June 5, 2020 (Chinese).
Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Wan is the family name here, Weixing is the first name.
personal data
SURNAME Wan, Weixing
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 万 卫星 (Chinese); Wàn Wèixīng (Pinyin)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chinese astrophysicist, chief scientist of the Chinese Mars program, member of parliament (Society of September 3rd)
DATE OF BIRTH July 1, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Tianmen , Hubei Province
DATE OF DEATH May 20, 2020
Place of death Beijing