Polish robots in race for Mars

Copernicus, Scorpio and Magma 2 are three Polish robots taking part in the International University Rover Challenge, a competition for college students to design and build the next generation of Mars exploration rovers. The three rovers from Poland are the only robots from Europe that qualified for the challenge.

The 2011 Mars Society’s University Rover Challenge (URC) will be held between 2 and 4 June 2-4 at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in Utah.
Teams and their rovers will compete in four events: an equipment servicing task, a site survey task, a sample return task and an emergency navigation task that will require rovers to search for an astronaut who is lost or injured.

Mirosław Hermaszewski (born September 15, 1941), is a retired Polish Air Force officer. He became the first (and to this day remains the only) Pole in space when he flew aboard the Soyuz 30 spacecraft in 1978.

Located in Chile a detector of the Polish project "Pi of the Sky" performed a series of photographs of four bright planets of the Solar System. Extremely rare conjunction of Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter is now clearly visible in the southern hemisphere, before sunrise.

The three inner planets of our solar system and the gas giant, Jupiter, are close to each other in the sky in April and May this year. Their conjunction is difficult to observe from the northern hemisphere, but it is easy to observe from the southern latitudes - every night.

Las Campanas Observatory is an astronomical observatory owned and operated by the Carnegie Institution for Science. The headquarters is located in La Serena, Chile 29.91041°S 71.24076°W and the observatory is about 100 km to the northeast.

The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment or OGLE is a Polish astronomical project based at the University of Warsaw that is chiefly concerned with discovering dark matter using the microlensing technique.

The rovers are awarded points for completing four scientific tasks:
Surveying a site to locate markers that should be visible from specific vantage points.
Collecting and returning a sample likely to contain photosynthetic bacteria, other colonies of bacteria, or other organisms such as lichens.
Deliver supplies to mock astronauts out in the desert.
Service equipment by pushing buttons, flipping switches, and connecting three-prong plugs (U.S. style) into electrical outlets at an instrument panel.

Registration for the 2011 University Rover Challenge has closed.  Meet this year's competitors:

Last day of Challenge
It is 14:26, we returned to our hostel six hours ago. All went pretty well for us today. Not many revelations but we participated in both tasks and we will collect some points! :) We were so close to collect many more points but I will describe today's tasks later.

In the course of packing one of the organizers began talking with me and asked if we had participated in any European competitions and he said that we have done here an excellent job and he was impressed. I said that it was our debut and had never competed before. He said he was very happy to see us here. Another person asked me whether Wroclaw and Warsaw are the same…

The Polish scientists face a big task, as the current US Mar's rovers are still working (at least one is) and they have far exceeded their 'life expectancy'.

But roving on Mars is not easy, and eventually Spirit found some sand that left it stranded. Since the JPL AAA card does not work on Mars, the rover had, in essence, dug its own grave. It was just a matter of time that the batteries would run down for lack of juice from the photovoltaic solar cells.

Magma2 was the first European team to win URC.  Also they were the first team to ever deploy an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as part of the competition.  Coupled with a rover constructed primarily of clear polycarbonate that made it lightweight, the Bialystok team impressed the judges and navigated the tasks like seasoned professionals.  It wasn't just parlor tricks that won the event for Magma2.  The resounding quality of their rover from top to bottom was critical to their success.

An in-depth analysis will also be presented at the Fourteenth Annual International Mars Society Convention in Dallas, Texas, August 4-7, 2011.

Nine teams: two from Canada, three from Poland, four from USA

We have the strongest man in the world

the Pope

the man who invented modern astronomy, and now the future of space exploration... in your face Russia, U.K., and Germany. Anyone who says Polish people are dumb should look at this.

Galileo Galilei is generally (and rightly) regarded as father modern astronomy. Maybe not in Poland but everywhere else.

Galileo put forward the basic principle of relativity, that the laws of physics are the same in any system that is moving at a constant speed in a straight line, regardless of its particular speed or direction. Hence, there is no absolute motion or absolute rest. This principle provided the basic framework for Newton's laws of motion and is central to Einstein's special theory of relativity.

often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy and the defining epiphany that began the scientific revolution. His heliocentric model, with the Sun at the center of the universe, demonstrated that the observed motions of celestial objects can be explained without putting Earth at rest in the center of the universe.

Remember for in the 80s they were saying that by this time we'd be living on Mars, what a crock of ****.

t's pretty cool. btw, I luv your passion :)

So your point is?

instead of the classic 'face to close to the page' , display you have given

Names are proposed to the International Astronomical Union (IAU).  It is this international assembly that officially designates the names of asteroids and other minor planets in the Solar System.