site.btaBulgarian-Made Cameras Will Land on Mars in 2025, Scientist Hopes

Bulgarian-made cameras stand a chance of landing on Mars in 2025, in a manned mission that will mark the pinnacle of NASA's Artemis Program, Dr Petko Dinev said in an exclusive interview on Bulgarian National Television.

The Artemis 1 Orion spacecraft successfully splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday after a 25-day mission that took it into lunar orbit. The launch of Orion's Space Launch System (SLS) booster rocket from Cape Canaveral on November 16 was recorded by 14 on-board aerospace imaging cameras made in Bulgarian and assembled by ten Bulgarians at Dr Dinev's Imperx company office in Boca Raton, Florida.

"Our cameras had to follow the separation of the stages, of the two side boosters, of the main stage and the release of the capsule," Dr Dinev said in his interview. "They did a very good job because we saw in one of the videos that a piece of the rocket was separating. It may well have been a chunk of ice, but it could be something else, too," he added.

"The very opportunity of being part of the Mars programme is incredible, and so is the fact that NASA trusts us and keeps trusting us," he added. Dr Dinev hopes that his team will be part of that mission, too. The cameras that will fly to Mars require the best possible protection of electronics from radiation in deep space.

Two hundred Imperx cameras are currently orbiting the Earth on low-orbit satellites.

Dr Dinev's team is ready with the cameras for the next Artemis space flights until 2027. NASA have already tested the devices for higher radiation and vibration exposures, and they have been approved.

"We must be proud that, one way or another, Bulgaria is involved in this immense NASA programmes," the scientist told National Television.