Archive | Portraits 2018 – 2017

2018/10/08

© University of Bern

Risky maneuvers on the way to Mercury

When the BepiColombo spacecraft takes off for Mercury on 20 October 2018, it will also be carrying an instrument from Peter Wurz, Professor of Experimental Space and Planetary Physics at the University of Bern. In an interview with "uniaktuell" he tells what the mass spectrometer STROFIO will have to do with Mercury.

2018/10/08

© University of Bern

"Mercury awaits us at 400 degrees Celsius"

The BepiColombo spacecraft is scheduled to start its journey from the Kourou spaceport to Mercury on 20 October 2018. Nicolas Thomas, Director of the Institute of Physics at the University of Bern, and his team designed and built the most important and delicate instrument on board. In an interview with "uniaktuell" he talks about the challenges.

2018/07/23

© University of Bern

"Like looking into the distance with a telescope"

NASA is seeking to look beyond the limits of our solar system with a new space probe from 2024 – and the University of Bern is helping to build the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP). For Peter Wurz and André Galli from the Space Research & Planetary Sciences Division, missions like this are never routine.

2017/10/27

© University of Bern/UniAKTUELL

"Space research is not a nine-to-five job"

On October 27, 1967, space research began at the University of Bern with the test flight of a Zenit rocket. Many more milestones have followed over the past 50 years. In an interview to mark the anniversary, Peter Wurz, head of the Department of Space Research and Planetology, looks back at the past, ahead to the future, and up at the stars.