Word: spirit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...inexpensive spacecraft (a few hundred million dollars apiece, which is tag-sale prices by spaceship standards) NASA has launched toward Mars in the last dozen years. The Mars Express and Mars Odyssey orbiters have done the true yeoman's work, extensively mapping the planet from high overhead. The Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity rovers have made the headlines, toddling around in the soil of the Red Planet and sending back portfolios of pictures. But it's Phoenix that could make the most thrilling discoveries...
...lifespan low. If the ship operates for just a few months before the punishing climate of the Martian poles kills it, the mission will still be considered a success. Like the other Mars landers before it, however, this one is designed with a much longer stay in mind. The Spirit and Opportunity rovers bounced down on Mars in 2004 with a similar lowball goal of just 90 days of operational life. Yet despite arthritic wheels and joints and the need for periodic power-conserving naps, both of them roll on. Phoenix, resting on the ice on its three static pads...
...powerful: stories of slave labor and child-kidnapping rings, rampant government corruption, counterfeit products, tainted food, dangerous toys and, lately, a crackdown on dissent in Tibet. But from a monstrous humanitarian crisis has come a new self-awareness, a recognition of the Chinese people's sympathy and generosity of spirit. The earthquake has been a "shock of consciousness" as scholar Jiang Wenran puts it, a collective epiphany when the nation was suddenly confronted with how much it had changed in two decades of booming growth - and liked what...
...This cathartic outpouring of national grief helped put paid to the notion that China lacks civic spirit. Academics have long argued that Confucian ideals, which emphasize duty to family, have mutated over the millenniums into a mentality that viewed contributions to non-relatives as a waste of precious personal resources. This trait was exaggerated by the beggar-thy-neighbor capitalism that has been Chinese society's driving force for the past two decades. Charitable donations from individuals and businesses in China amount to around 0.09% of GDP, compared with...
...stories of slave labor and child-kidnapping rings, rampant government corruption, counterfeit products, tainted food, dangerous toys and, lately, the brutal crackdown on dissent in Tibet. But from a monstrous humanitarian crisis has come a new self-awareness, a recognition of the Chinese people's sympathy and generosity of spirit. The earthquake has been a "shock of consciousness," as Wenran Jiang, a China scholar at the University of Alberta, puts it, a collective epiphany when the nation was suddenly confronted with how much it had changed in two decades of booming growth and how some changes have been...