Poles and Hungarians are becoming more significant within the scope of new (and applied) technologies as well as space research. Both nations have managed to launch their own satellites into space – built by students of technical universities. And although along the banks of the Vistula and around the Balaton, the scientific achievements of the two countries are still somewhat neglected by the media and business, their contribution to the general development of mankind is hard to overestimate.
Space is a field that should be fought for today, because although the acquisition and supply to Earth of natural resources from other planets or the asteroid belt still seems to be beyond the reach of available technologies, reaching for these resources is a question of a decade at most. Poland and Hungary may be among those who stand to benefit from the riches of near space, as for a few years now, in no uncertain terms and increasingly more noticeably, they have been affirming their presence in the Solar System. Even though such investments devour enormous amounts of money.
Poles and Hungarians in space
In the 1980s, Poland and Hungary had only one chance to actively participate in space exploration – they took part in one of the most important space exploration programmes in the history of mankind, "Interkosmos", as part of the group of Soviet satellite states. That's how the Polish pilot Mirosław Hermaszewski together with a Russian cosmonaut flew into space in 1978.
The Hungarians had more luck, because although they sent their pilot Bertalan Farkas into space two years after the Poles, they reached space twice, and the second time, Charles Simonyi flew into space as the fifth space tourist and the second Hungarian. It is worth bearing in minds that this cosmonaut visited orbital space twice - each time paying for his own space flights.
The second Hungarian in space is a physicist, Kossuth Prize winner and creator of the first Hungarian particle accelerator. Today, his knowledge and skills are valued by credit rating agencies at $3.3 billion – mainly thanks to his career in Microsoft, where he was a co-creator of Word and Excel, to name a few. It is to him that the powerhouse from Redmond owes the use of object-oriented programming (nowadays a commonplace in Windows and Microsoft applications), which Simonyi introduced to the company.
Charles Simonyi is the author and owner of 11 patents related to programming and new technologies and one of the richest people in the world, and similar to his friend Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, he is a philanthropist committed to supporting the development of science.
And he clearly is not the last astronaut with Hungarian roots. One has to remember that within five years, another Hungarian was set to appear in space, as part of the Hungarian-Russian space project, and live on the International Space Station.
Last year the head of Hungarian diplomacy Péter Szijjártó signed an agreement with the Russian Roskosmos Space Agency .
– Ongoing space projects with Hungarian technology's added value will be officially recognised as Hungarian-Russian space exploration projects – said Szijjártó at the time. – Together we've set the goal for Hungarian-Russian space research and cooperation in the field of space technology, so that a Hungarian astronaut can start working on the International Space Station by 2024-2025. The Hungarian space industry may seem to belong to the category of science fiction for the time being, because we don't talk about it much, but Hungarian space industry enterprises and Hungarian space research teams are known all over the world and their efforts are recognized all over the world.
The candidate selection and training procedure is already underway.
Latest generation lunar rover
The Hungarians are working quite intensively on space research without making a big deal about it. They have had considerable successes, but it should be remembered that, just like Poland, they owe it mainly to students of polytechnics and technical universities, who are involved in the work on new technologies, seeing these as an opportunity to build not only their own, individual future, but also the importance of their country in the world.
Here, in the middle of the second decade of the present century, the Hungarian rover made a "panoramic selfie", finishing a simulation of the Google Lunar XPRIZE mission in Hawaii.
Team Puli, a Hungarian team competing for Google Lunar XPRIZE, completed a successful lunar rover mission simulation at the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES) in Hawaii. During field tests, the Puli rover drove 600 meters on soft, loose soil similar to that of lunar regolith and transmitted high-resolution images and video from the start and end points. In order to compete for the Google Lunar XPRIZE, the team must land an automated craft on the Moon and examine its surface, covering a distance of at least 500 meters, as well as send footage and photos back to Earth from their landing site, the journey and where it finally comes to rest.
The new lunar testing facility was opened in early 2013 and is located on the slopes of Mauna Kea. The volcanic soil of this mountain and the surrounding area are commonly considered to be most similar to the lunar regolith anywhere on Earth.
During eight days of testing at PISCES, the Hungarian Puli team verified several key aspects of its Google Lunar XPRIZE mission. These included processes for planning the route of the rover from the landing site using satellite imagery, testing the mobility of the rover in analogous lunar areas with slopes of up to 40 degrees at different locations, and testing the Mission Control software for both the rover and the second test vehicle. The mission control for the simulation was in Budapest, from where the Puli Team controlled the actual attempt of their readiness for humankind to return to the Silver Globe.
– The Puli rover has a unique foot construction, designed especially for difficult terrain, – explained Puli team leader Dr. Tibor Pacher from Budapest University of Technology. – This is not the first time that Puli has been tested in analogue settings - we took part in a field test in Morocco in early 2013. - But the PISCES facility offers the most difficult and realistic scenario that our vehicle has faced. We finished Maunacast with panoramic pictures of our start and finish points, site identification and remote verifications. We are delighted with the performance of the Hungarian machine.
Dr. Pacher also explained that he saw great opportunities in the Hungarian Google Lunar XPRIZE project "because of Hungary's strong tradition in engineering and science". Moreover, thanks to the contacts of Hungarian students with young scientists from other parts of the world, Budapest's participation in a real European lunar mission seems increasingly real.
Space also for the white and reds
Polish presence in space is also much more noticeable and recognizable today than the Soviet flight with the Polish cosmonaut Mirosław Hermaszewski, which was publicized in the 1980s in the Eastern Bloc countries. For years, Poles have been taking part in the most important research missions. In space, Poland already has four satellites of its own, built, just as the Hungarian MaSat1, by young scientists and students from Budapest University of Technology.
Space exploration is still not taken too seriously by politicians and business (due to a slight whiff of scientific fantasy – as politicians explain). For them, the main value is the obvious prestige of Poland on the international arena and the argument in the election campaign that in the current term of office Poles managed to gain yet another seemingly unattainable peak. Business, if it is not clearly related to the space industry, approaches space exploration solely as an area occupied by science. Is this right?
Thus far, the most profitable business related to space is space tourism. Virgin Galactic, owned by Richard Branson, made a general test of the first civilian passenger shuttle launching it to a suborbital altitude of 82 km without passengers for the last time. Rockets will be used and their parts will land on special platforms for reuse.
Since Poland became the 20th member state of the European Space Agency in November 2012 (Hungary joined the ESA three years later), the Polish government has paid a contribution of around 30 million euros per year to the Agency's budget. However, it has undoubtedly opened the way for Polish companies and research centres to develop space technologies and satellite techniques faster through the possibility of full participation in most of the Agency's programmes and deeper cooperation with the American NASA.
Currently, there are over a dozen commercial companies operating on the banks of the Vistula, dealing exclusively with the space industry and making money from lucrative but not easy contracts with NASA or the European Space Agency. An example of such cooperation is the recently famous Mole by Astronika – an instrument that has reached Mars with the American InSight probe and penetrates deep into the Martian soil exploring the composition and structure of the Red Planet soil. The Mole is a device designed and constructed by Astronika in cooperation with numerous Polish research institutions, whose task will be to dig into the depth of about five meters and examine the temperature of the planet to find out how hot its interior is. The RISE device on the basis of an anomaly in Mars' rotation, will allow scientists to determine how liquid its central part is. Combining this information will provide a completely new perspective on the structure of the rocky planets in the Solar System. The Mole is not the only Polish addition to this mission, as Jerzy Gregorczuk from Astronika is a NASA mission co-investigator. He has already gained experience by designing the MUPUS penetrator for the Rosetta mission – the first probe sent towards a comet.
Poles are landing everywhere
MUPUS (MUlti PUrpose Sensor for surface and subsurface science) is a mechanically advanced manipulator, equipped with a penetrator, whose task was to embed itself into the 67P/Czuriumow-Gierasimienko comet surface. The penetrator contained a number of detectors which, after landing on the comet in 2014, allowed to examine the physical properties and composition of the comet's core.
A sensor for temperature and thermal conductivity measurement was also developed and built in Poland. The THP Sensor was part of one of the most important scientific missions in history, namely Cassini-Huygens mission. The sensor was mounted aboard the Huygens lander, which in January 2005 landed on the surface of Titan, Saturn's moon, the farthest body in the Solar System, on which any man-made vessel landed. The measurements made by the sensor yielded data on the surface properties of that moon.
Polish engineers developed a power supply system and a scanner to determine the direction of measurement for the Planetary Fourier Spectrometer (PFS), whose task was to analyse the spectrum of radiation reflected and emitted by the Mars surface and atmosphere in the Mars Express mission. Piles have been to Mars before that. The famous Curiosity rover, which has been investigating the surface of Mars since 2012, is equipped with a tunable laser spectrometer, which includes uncooled MCT infrared detectors designed and manufactured by the Polish VIGO System. The task of the spectrometer is to collect information about the environment on the surface of Mars. Research carried out during all missions involving Poles is to be the basis for the first manned flight to this planet.
Whereas the key elements of the local oscillator for the Herschel Space Observatory far high infrared heterodyne spectrometer (HIFI) launched in 2009 were developed at the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. The device is used, among other things, to explain the formation of galaxies and star formation and to study gas-dust clouds and comet matter.
Will the artificial brain talk in Hungarian?
The Visegrád Group countries, until now treated as lower category, are increasingly important in research on another area fundamental to civilisational development.
Hungarian scientists from the Wigner Physics Research Centre, in their detailed research on artificial intelligence, using mathematical models to better understand the thought processes behind the phenomena of life, such as the way biological organisms interpret the world around them.
The team is looking at specific differences in the way information is interpreted by artificial and natural systems on the basis of a comparison of German data from experiments on monkeys with the mechanisms used by AI systems.
– Our aim is to identify the basic mathematics of biological systems, – explained Gergő Orbán, a researcher at the Wigner Center in a recent interview for M1 television. – Finding similarities and differences between the mathematical algorithms used by living organisms and artificial neural networks should lead to a better understanding of how our brain works. Neural networks can help predict how our brain will process unexpected information. Natural systems surround them with their inner world models, which allows them to cater for the notion of uncertainty which artificial systems are not yet capable of. Our research should ultimately foster better AI systems.
Intra-university cooperation
For years, students from technical universities and major universities in both countries have been cooperating more closely within the scope of space research and development of new technology. It is not only a simple exchange of students under international programmes or bilateral cooperation agreements, but also participation in conferences and scientific symposia organised by partner institutions, inviting cooperating scientists from both countries to conferences and symposia organised by Polish and Hungarian universities and technical colleges, doctoral internships and joint research work. For the latter, their effects will certainly increase the importance of Poland and Hungary not only in the world of science, but also in economic areas, by introducing innovation and competing increasingly more vigorously with the powerhouses on the scientific and economic map of the world still controlled by the USA, China, Russia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom.
Paweł Pietkun
Journalist, has worked for WNET radio, Tygodnik Solidarność, Gazeta Obywatelska. Author of the "Ze sztambucha emigranta" and "Tu Radio Solidarność. Historia podziemnego Radia Solidarność" books.
Bert Vis, Colin Burgess: "Interkosmos: The Eastern Bloc's Early Space Program"
https://spacewatch.global/2019/12/govt-would-spend-10-billion-huf-on-hungarian-space-project/
https://hungarytoday.hu/selection-of-hungarian-astronaut-to-begin-for-2024-hungary-russia-space-project/
https://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/glxp-team-puli-visits-hawaii-to-test-rover/
https://www.astrobotic.com/2016/9/16/team-puli-space-is-the-third-google-lunar-xprize-team-to-reserve-a-ride-to-the-moon-with-astrobotic
pulispace.com/news/puli-reserves-ride-to-the-moon/
https://rmx.news/article/article/hungarian-scientists-new-approach-ai-research