On Sunday, August 7, Dionysius Simopoulos passed away after a courageous battle with cancer. A few days before he “left”, true to his date with “K” and the column “On the occasion”, he sent, as if nothing had happened, the next collaboration. We publish it in memory of an unforgettable person and a rare partner who will be greatly missed …

In the middle of last month (July 16-24), Athens became the international center for space science and technology. In those days, about 3,000 scientific papers over the past few years were presented at the world scientific conference, either directly or via the Internet. It was the first and largest scientific and hybrid conference ever held. The choice of Athens was unanimously accepted when the nomination was proposed four years ago, perhaps for the first time in the annals of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) thanks to the caliber of Greek space explorers. After all, our country’s interest in space includes the relatively recent creation of the Greek Space Center.

As Dr. Leonard A. Fisk, outgoing president of COSPAR, characteristically said, “The Athens conference has been the most scientifically, technically and organizationally successful in at least the last few years” since the first events began in 1950- x years. And this is largely thanks to the soul of the conference, the Greek academician Stamatis Krimizis, the vice-president of the conference, Dr. Manolis Georgoulis, as well as members of the scientific and local organizing committee. To better understand the scale of the conference in Greece, we note that the presentations were held in 30 halls of the Athens Concert Hall and the Caravel Hotel, which is much more than any previous event.

Busy with our daily lives, we are often unable to recognize these modern human explorations and the possibilities that the presence of our tools and our machines in general in Space gives us. The icing on the cake of this whole event was the explanation of the first photographs from the James Webb Space Telescope, which were taken at the press conference of the Athens Conference by John Mather (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2006), who is the Senior Scientist of the James Webb Space Telescope Project. As he characteristically stated, “the telescope and its scientific instruments (with a possible lifetime of 20 years) perform better than expected.”

Modern space ships and satellites are ships that will open the boundless sea of ​​the Cosmos, just as Columbus and Magellan opened the earth’s oceans to mankind.

Some of the most interesting announcements selected by the scientific committee to be shown to the international and Greek public include various solar activity phenomena. Also interesting was the presentation by Athena Cousteny, Research Director of the French Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) of the Paris Observatory, on the latest achievements in the field of protecting our planet. Other space activities include the Mars sample return mission and the difficulties of such a mission. Finally, there were enough references to the atmospheres of Europa’s moons Jupiter and Titan and Saturn’s Enceladus.

Thus, the scientific community is given the opportunity to “share” with all current developments, and in a simple and understandable way. The press conference was co-ordinated by veteran journalist Makis Provatas and Michael Buckley, Senior Communications Manager at Johns Hopkins University.

As for national priorities in space, they should be determined based on the needs of the country. However, in order to arrive at directions for space applications, we must first see where we have the necessary critical mass of scientists and engineers, as well as the infrastructures that will be created in accordance with national and economic priorities, as well as the need to support scientific communities and industries involved in space. This design is clearly the work of a new organization, and any project that emerges should not be static but dynamic, continually enriched by scientific and technological developments. So what a country needs is to define its space policy based on the goals and capabilities that we have.

Given all these discoveries, it would not be an exaggeration to say that each of us daily uses dozens of objects that appear as a result of our space activities. This great new age of discovery promises to enrich the whole world with new ideas and knowledge, new technologies and perhaps a new spirit of peace and cooperation. And it may turn out that the greatest treasure, the most precious gem of our space exploration, is the realization that we live on an isolated island in an ebony sea. In this vast sea, modern spaceships and satellites are our new cargo ships, the treasure ships of the new ocean. Ships that would open the boundless sea of ​​the Cosmos, like Columbus and Magellan, opened the earth’s oceans to mankind.

* Dionysis P. Simopoulos was the honorary director of the Eugenides Planetarium.