After a long period our succesful bilingual blog, we have now moved forward to a new blogging strategy. We address our international audience on our Google Lunar XPRIZE blog, and started a more colloquial style blog for our Hungarian tongues on one of the leading internet portals of Hungary, Index.hu: pulispace.blog.hu.

We continue the educational series Space, Moon and the Hungarians and What's out there? - About Space, as well as our  latest news services about Puli and the Space World in English and in Hungarian, here on our website.

Enjoy!

The summer heat has challenged not only the people, but Team Puli, and its technology too: e.g., IT failures are more common in this part of the year. And, sadly, one of the important hard drives of Puli - the one on which we store the raw material of our outreach videos -, suffered a serious breakdown as well. Although the data are regularly saved on a separate disc,  due to the disc failure some of the critical data for our educational mission became unavailable.

Fortunately, this was only temporal: KÜRT Co. has heard about our struggles, and gave us help. Even though the hard drive had to be taken to pieces, the professionals of KÜRT returned all of our data without loss. After their help, an agreement has been made between Puli and KÜRT, and thus we happily greet KÜRT among our bronze sponsors!

The organizers of the Bridge of Sciences expected around 3,000 visitors. Estimated 20,000 came, so it is not a big surprise that some traffic jams formed. This happened at our booth as well - it was hard to get through to us. Wow!

Under picture book weather conditions many people came to the Chain Bridge. Let us take a birds' point of view just after opening the bridge to the public. Enjoy this awesome image by STOP/Leéb Ádám!

I believe then that it is not an understatement to say: the event, and within that, Team Puli Space's presentation was a HUGE SUCCESS! Congrats & kudos to the organizers, and of course, we are more than happy to report, that our lectures on the central stage as well as the Puli Space booth attracted many visitors.

Meet us on the 17th of September on the Bridge of Sciences!

Located on the picturesque Chain Bridge in the heart of Budapest, a large open air science fair awaits all visitors with programs for all ages. Yes, there will be dry ice, but the lineup also includes robot football, vulcanologists, nanobus, moonrocks, floating superconductors, and many cutting edge innovations from Hungary including yours truly, with our latest rover designs, flight plans and enthusiastic Team Puli members who will gladly show you how a moonrover is being built. Find us next to the beer stalls (where else...) or listen to our presentations on the main stage where Zoltán E. Kovács will talk about why the Moon does not fall on our head (16:05), the 60 years of Moon exploration by Márton Deák (16:25) or how the Puli will get to the Moon by team leader Tibor Pacher (16:45). A flyer of the event can be found here, the official page of the Bridge of Science is at http://www.facebook.com/tudomanyokhidja.

See you there!

1622. No, not the year 1622, 1.622 m/s², the gravitational acceleration on the surface of the Moon, basically the amount of gravity pulling you, sticking your... boots to the lunar soil (bare feet are not recommended). That's, as you may recall, about one sixth compared to the g here on Earth which is 9.81 m/s². And it has some consequences.

John Young, commander of Apollo-16, does the Big Navy Salute. He jumped up over knee height in a heavy spacesuit. Twice.

Our journey started on Saturday, July the 30th in the early morning hours. After collecting the expedition team we started off at around 7 o'clock to Romania where Paul Dolea was waiting for us for a chat and the presentation of his observatory in Mărişel.

Team Puli Space is proud to annouce that S&T Consulting Hungary Ltd became our first Gold Sponsor. The company will support the Puli project as its exclusive CAD/CAM partner by providing software for planning, modelling and simulating various aspects of the lunar mission. The support package contains software licences, training programs and consulting services for a total value of several ten million HUF (~ several hundred thousand USD) in the next 3 years.

A mission to send a rover to the Moon is rocket science. No organization is capable of planning and completing such a complex project without state of the art IT support. In accordance with this, programmers and engineers at team Puli Space now have the opportunity to design the rover, plan its functions and simulate its operation with the newest generation software tools of PTC, one of the leading CAD/CAM providers of the world.

Our Team Leader, Tibor Pacher, visited the GLXP Team Summit. Here's his short report.

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My journey to the 2011 Team Summit started with a two and a half hour delay of the Budapest-New York flight on 9th July, with the suggestion to take a hotel in NYC on Saturday night before heading to San Francisco. This seemed not to be a good start, but things turned soon to better.

Fortunately, after our arrival at the JFK Airport it became clear soon that there is still a place for me on the late flight to San Francisco; moreover, I could get on board timely as well. So I reached California more or less on time Saturday night, where the Team Summit was then immediately present; at the Rental Car Desk I met the delegates of Part-Time-Scientists, and it was good to have a first chat with Robert.

After a little Sunday-sight-seeing tour in San Francisco (where I have visited some places I knew from my earlier visits, Golden Gate from a not-so-usual perspective inclusive), I fully arrived at the Team Summit already in my hotel, where I met Andrew from White Label Space as well as two founders of Space IL, Yonatan and Kfir.