Annuncio

Partnership with Wings for Science

07 Marzo 2013

ESO has initiated an outreach partnership with the ORA Wings for Science project, which offers aerial support to public research organisations while on a journey around the world. The project has recently taken some stunning photographs of the observatories in northern Chile, such as the largest astronomy project in existence, the international Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) [1].

ORA (Observe, Report, Analyse) is a non-profit organisation whose members are either scientists, teachers or aeronautics professionals. The two crew members of the Wings for Science Project, Clémentine Bacri and Adrien Normier, are flying around the world, helping out scientists with aerial capabilities ranging from air sampling to archaeology, biodiversity observation and 3D terrain modeling. Short movies and amazing pictures that are produced during the flights are used for educational purposes and for promoting local research. Their circumnavigation started in June 2012 and will finish in June 2013 with a landing at the Paris Air Show. They fly in a special environmentally friendly ultralight aircraft [2].

Some of the best of the aerial photos taken by Wings for Science of the ESO observatories in Chile will be published over the coming months on the ESO web pages.

Notes

[1] The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA is funded in Europe by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), in North America by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in cooperation with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) and in East Asia by the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS) of Japan in cooperation with the Academia Sinica (AS) in Taiwan. ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by ESO, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), which is managed by Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.

[2] The ultralight aircraft is a NASA-award winning Pipistrel Virus SW 80 using only 7 liters of fuel per 100 km — less than most cars.

Links

• Wings for Science

Contatti

Clémentine Bacri
Adrien Normier
ORA Wings for Science
Email: anormier@gmail.com

Lars Lindberg Christensen
ESO education and Public Outreach Department
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6761
Cell: +49 173 3872 621
Email: lars@eso.org