Space, the Moon, and the Hungarians - an introduction
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As a start, we are creating a campaign to promote scientific thinking and to raise general awareness about the importance of space in our everyday life. Since our team has many ties to the country of Hungary, our first program will mainly target the Hungarian audience and the country's role in space exploration. We will produce a series of articles on this page detailing Hungary's past and present projects aiming for the skies, with a special focus on Moon related activities. The country has a surprisingly rich space history, mostly unknown to the general public. As the seventh nation to send a man to space, Hungary's first cosmonaut orbited Earth in 1980 decades before many of today's prominent powers. But apart from being involved in the Soviet space program and doing various experiments on several space stations, Hungarians also worked in the Apollo program back in the '60s, and are taking part in missions of the European Space Agency both in engineering and in scientific research today. This article series by Puli Space Technologies aims to provide an overview of these topics and many more, so stay with us and get a glimpse of how such a small country set foot outside our home planet, in Space, the Moon, and the Hungarians. By Máté Ravasz The articles are: An unexpected visitor at Andromeda Space Exploration with Your Own Hands: Hunveyor Conquers the Field Luna 16 and the Hungarians: a bit of Moon dust in Budapest Zoltán Bay and the Moon radar experiment Interview with Ferenc Pavlics, lead developer of the Apollo Lunar Rovers |
Puli Space Technologies is more than just a team sending a probe to the Moon. We are developing a wide range of activities connected to space sciences, and we consider it a top priority to let others get involved in this as well. We believe that our success depends on allowing many people to contribute to the discovery of the world outside our planet, no matter how small that contribution is. From a school project to professional scientific work, every such activity brings us a step closer to better understand the universe. It also gives a chance to the broader public to get a taste of the final frontier for humankind: space.
An unexpected visitor at Andromeda
The two photographs were collected on the night of 15th and 16th of december, 1974. It was a tumultous period for the Konkoly Obsevatory: the 1m telescope was inaugurated during that time and László Detre, director for three decades died only a few months before. Those episodes may contributed to the neglect of the small streak next to the magnificent Andromeda galaxy: Miklós overlooked it too, might be considering it as a meteor or other error. He looked at them about half a year later when somebody asked for pictures of the Andromeda galaxy. Them, because photographs were always collected in pairs during the supernova patrol to have a control image. When he looked at the plates they almost knocked his socks off – the streak was there on the second plate, continuing where the first ended, fingerprints of a fast-moving, hence very close asteroid. Read more...
Last Updated (Friday, 10 June 2011 19:47) |
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Miklós Lovas hunted extragalactic supernovae for three decades with the Schmidt telescope at Piszkéstető. Many different phenomena also showed up on the countless photographic plates used to record the images of galaxies. Though some of them, the more interesting asteroids and comets were followed, resources did not permit it in all cases. And sometimes they were simply overlooked. The same happened with the pair of plates where a curious little visitor left its traces. Miklós showed me the photographs and asked me whether the story could be recorded as an interesting piece of history during the interview about 
A lot of ideas, a lot of measuring and above all teamwork was needed for the Hunveyor to be born. The experimental space probe model offers a great outlook to the world and immediately captures the students. We were talking to the man behind the Hunveyor dream, Szaniszló Bérczi.
