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Episode 128: George Danos: Cyprus in Space

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George Danos. President of CSEO

Cyprus is a small country with a small economy with big ambitions in space. George Danos is the president of the Cyprus Space Exploration  Organisation and is considered by some as Cyprus’s Carl Sagan. He has been championing the case for space in Cyprus for years.

In this episode, recorded during Cospar 2025 in Nicosia, he describes the rise of Cyprus’s space activities in communication services, small satellites, collaboration with ESA and more.

  • As President of the Cyprus Space Exploration Organisation (CSO), George Danos has been pivotal in advancing Cyprus’s space programme, particularly regarding international partnerships, infrastructure development, and commercialisation.
  • CSO created spin-off companies, such as Space System Solutions, to promote technology transfer.
  • Cyprus recently achieved Associate Membership status within the European Space Agency (ESA).
  • George Danos spearheaded CSO’s major role in achieving the ESA PECs (Plan for European Cooperating States since around 2016.
  • Establishing the International Space Innovation Centre (CSpark) in Cyprus
  • The first fully integrated Cypriot CubeSat is targeted for readiness by 2026.
  • CSO signed an MOU with Japan’s IHI for new-generation secure maritime communication and India’s Pixxel space, focusing on hyperspectral Earth observation sensors.

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Episode 112 – Brown Dwarfs, Dark Matter and Dark Energy

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This episode was recorded in Tenerife with Professor Eduardo L Martín, who is based at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. He is working on the European Space Agency’s mission, Euclid.

In time, Euclid will shed light on both dark matter and dark energy. It was launched in July 2023 and arrived in its L2 orbit a month later. It has just two instruments, which will produce a high-resolution 3-D map of a third of the sky, stretching back 10 billion years during its initial 6-year operational lifetime.

Professor Martín is not part of the Euclid Consortium, which includes around 2500 scientists and engineers from more than a dozen countries who operate the Euclid Mission. He is one of the two Independent Legacy Scientists for the Euclid mission. Professor Martín is a specialist in substellar bodies, that is, celestial bodies with a size about that of Jupiter but with around 50 times its mass. When initially theorised in the 1960s, they were called Black Dwarfs, but were renamed Brown Dwarfs by Jill Tarter in the 1970s.

Brown Dwarfs generate energy only through gravitational compression, not nuclear fusion. There is an overlap in surface temperature between young brown dwarfs and old very low-mass stars. Martín and his collaborators have developed spectroscopic methods to distinguish brown dwarfs from stars, in particular, the Lithium test. More about this interesting role of Lithium in cosmology is in Professor Martín’s book, published in 2023 by the Institute of Physics, entitled “Lithium Across the Universe“. You can download several free-to-read chapters here.

Brown Dwarfs emit mostly infrared light, not optical light, like our sun. One of the two instruments on Euclid operates in the infrared and can detect these “dark ultracold objects of substellar mass”. Does Professor Martin think Euclid will find Brown Dwarfs? He told me in this recording, “that is what I put in the proposal, so we had better do now”. He is supported by a postdoctoral researcher, Marusa Zerjal, and a student, Diego Martin, both funded by the European Research Council.

The first images were released in November 2023. The spacecraft and its instruments are operating well and sending data. More about the Euclid mission, images released so far and a summary of the attributes of Normal Matter, Dark Matter and Dark Energy below.

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Episode 100 Sandra Benitez Herrera – ESA Education Outreach

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Astrophysicist Sandra Benitez-Herrera  talks about the opportunities for teachers and students made available by the European Space Agency‘s CESAR (Cooperation through Education in Science and Astronomy Research) program. This episode was recorded in Athens in July during Cospar 2022.

If you are a student or a teacher in Europe or beyond, Sandra explains how you make use of CESAR’s resources – optical, solar and radio telescopes, online seminars, face-to-face training and an enormous quantity of space data from ESA and other space agencies. All in one place and with no charge. She starts with an explanation of what CESAR is – in audio and Youtube video below.

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New Book – Atlas of Space Rocket Launch Sites

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ISBN 978-3-86922-758-0
Size 240 x 300 mm
272 pages
500 images
Index
Glossary
Hardcover

** Description and look-inside below **

Available from: dom-publishers.com, www.amazon.com, www.freytagberndt.com, www.mondadoristore.it, www.lehmanns.de and www.abebooks.co.uk – a variety of suppliers at many lower prices.

Learn more from podcasts: New Space India, The Spaceshow and Aviation-Xtended

Book Reviews: www.wallpaper.com, www.raumfahrer.net, flugundzeit.blog, www.ivorypress.com and collectspace.com

To purchase signed copies directly from the authors contact Brian Harvey or Gurbir Singh

The book describes primary launch sites around the world including some that are historically significant but no longer operating (e.g Peenamunde) as well as the new kids on the block (e.g Kodiak).

The book is edited by Paul Meuser who has written the foreword and sourced most of the 500 or so majestic photos of launch sites and their environments. The majority of the text is authored by Dublin-based author Brian Harvey. A prodigious writer who has been writing on space programs of numerous countries since the 1970s. Katrin Soschinski designed stunning maps, the foundation of any atlas.

Copy of the back text page and a few sample pages from the book in the slide show below. These sample pages can be downloaded here albeit the quality is way inferior to the original.

Back page text

The machines that orbit our planet live in a void environment–
however, space travel itself does not exist in a vacuum. Traveling
to space is an immense effort of humans and machines, taking
not just ‘a small step for a man’ but leaving a huge carbon
footprint in the process. We are in the midst of a paradigm shift
in which private companies and leadership figures in the form of
Billionaires are re-popularizing space travel to an extent not seen
since the space race of the USSR and USA. Space exists isolated
from the place that births its mechanical and a few select human
inhabitants. Thus we tend to forget that every single thing that
exits our atmosphere takes with it more than just its own weight
of materials when it departs our fragile blue marble.

This book offers a unique look at the physical footprints of earth’s
launch sites. With most places hidden away in jungles, deserts, or
amidst the Central Asian steppes, these places exist for the most
part out of the eye of the general public. With satellites facilitating
our modern society and a modern space age ever-present in today’s
news cycle, it is now more important than ever to think about the
imprint these undertakings leave on earth. To begin to answer
the new socio-economic questions raised by our rapid expansion
into the void, we need to look no further than follow the cracks in
the concrete of our planetary launch sites. The rusty train tracks
leading to the pad break the pristine and sterile looks of space, and
reopen our eyes to the realities of space exploration.