“We sent the second Pole into space, and we sent him not only on an orbital spacecraft, but to the most advanced laboratory, the International Space Station”, Bukała told Polish Press Agency (PAP).
Speaking at a press meeting summarizing the mission, Bukała said that although nearly a year had passed and initial results from the experiments were available, some experiments had still not returned from orbit. She said processing data from such a complex mission would take years.
Bukała highlighted the scale of Poland’s contribution compared with other European Space Agency members. In a similar mission carried out earlier by Sweden, a founding ESA member, two experiments flew, while Poland, which has belonged to the agency for 10 years, prepared and carried out 13.
Asked whether anything had gone wrong during IGNIS, Bukała said the mission had faced many technical and logistical challenges, including weather problems before launch, technical faults and a leak on the ISS.
“We sometimes joke that what happened on the spacecraft stays on the spacecraft, so of course there were many problems along the way”, she said.
“Our more experienced colleagues laughed that we had gone through every possible malfunction, and yet we flew, and yet we managed”, she added.
Bukała said the mission’s success was not a matter of luck but of coordinated teamwork, noting that more than 500 people were involved in preparing and operating the mission.
Asked how Poland could avoid wasting the potential created by IGNIS, she said what was now needed was “strategic leadership from the Polish delegation to ESA” and use of expert knowledge from astronaut Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski and others involved in the mission.
(jh)
Source: PAP