Calamos Supports Greece
GreekReporter.comInterviewsThe Atlantic Reports: "Greek Andreas Tziolas Is Drafting Blueprint For Mission To...

The Atlantic Reports: "Greek Andreas Tziolas Is Drafting Blueprint For Mission To Nearby Star"

In September of last year DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, convened a conference in Orlando, Florida, to discuss and promote one of its newest and most intriguing research projects: The 100 Year Starship Study. According to DARPA, the study is intended to “develop and mature a technology portfolio that will enable long-distance manned space flight a century from now.” To that end, DARPA is now negotiating a grant of $500,000 to ex-astronaut Dorothy Jemison, whose personal foundation will team up with Project Icarus, a division of Icarus Interstellar, to seed the plans for an interstellar mission that could span several centuries.

Project Icarus, which will focus on the mission’s technological challenges, is a theoretical engineering study that was launched in 2009 by the British Interplanetary Society with the purpose of designing an interstellar spacecraft. It brings together an international group of volunteer aerospace engineers from government space agencies, universities and the private sector, with the purpose of generating technical reports on the engineering layout, functionality, physics, operation, and mission profile of an interstellar probe. You can think of it as a kind of repository for bleeding-edge thinking about interstellar travel.

Project Icarus takes its inspiration from Project Daedalus, a five-year study launched by the British Interplanetary Society in 1973 to determine whether interstellar travel was feasible at all. Project Daedalus ultimately concluded that interstellar travel was possible, but acknowledged that the technical challenges were significant. Icarus aims to pick up where Daedalus left off, by trying to chip away at some of those technical challenges. Andreas Tziolas, a former research fellow at NASA who holds a Ph.D. in Gravitation and Cosmology, is the Project Leader for Project Icarus.

Andreas Tziolas stated during his interview in ‘The Atlantic’: “When I was growing up in Greece, I remember Star Trek would come on very early on Sunday mornings, but that didn’t stop me from watching — I never missed an episode. My mother used to joke, “if only you would get up for school with the same excitement that you get up on Sundays.”

“When it came time to choose a career, I knew it had to be this, because for something like this to get done someone has to say “I’m going to dedicate my life to this, to this thing that is difficult, this thing that is on the fringe of science, so that we can put down a kind of stepping stone, and the next generation can step on it in order to enter into this interstellar culture.”

For the whole interview please visit: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/02/project-icarus-laying-the-plans-for-interstellar-travel/253335/

(Source:’The Atlantic’)

See all the latest news from Greece and the world at Greekreporter.com. Contact our newsroom to report an update or send your story, photos and videos. Follow GR on Google News and subscribe here to our daily email!



Related Posts