Professor Marek Banaszkiewicz, former director of the Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, will lead Polish Space Agency (POLSA) for the next 5 years.
POLSA’s first director, during his 5-year term of leading the Agency, will have a lot of important challenges to overcome. The major ones would be administrative issues related with setting up the Agency and starting activities dedicated to entities in the Polish space sector.
Professor Banaszkiewicz is well-known in the European space sector. Before he became the director of Space Research Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences, he was involved in work related with MUPUS, the Polish drilling instrument, which was sent on board of the Philae lander probe (Rosetta mission). The instrument took samples from subsurface area of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
Earlier Prof. Banaszkiewicz was involved with the Polish science package taking temperature measures, which was installed on the Huygens lander of the Cassini mission. This was the most distant landing mission ever performed – Huygens landed on Titan, the biggest of Saturn’s moons in the beginning of 2005.
