TOLIMAN mission was awarded the Explorers Club flag
TOLIMAN mission by the University of Sydney, Breakthrough Initiatives, and powered by EnduroSat was awarded the Explorers Club flag
The Explorers Club was founded in 1904 in New York to celebrate the age of exploration. Since then, it has supported efforts to push the boundaries of human knowledge.
EnduroSat will design and build the TOLIMAN 16U MicroSat. It will perform high-precision astrometric measurements on the Alpha Centauri system. The search for exoplanets will focus on the habitable zone around two Sun-like stars, Alpha Centauri A and B.
The TOLIMAN mission has inherited an impressive pedigree. Early members of the Explorers Club were Robert Peary, who led the first expedition to the North Pole (1909), and Roald Amundsen who led the Norwegians in the race to the South Pole (1911).
Other members include Tenzig Norgay and Edmund Hillary, the first to have climbed Mount Everest (1953); Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, who took an Explorers Club flag to the Moon (1969); and Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, who took a flag to the depths of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean (1960).
TOLIMAN Principal Investigator Professor Peter Tuthill from the School of Physics at the University of Sydney said: “What an amazing honor for our team to be recognized in the same company as the polar explorers and lunar astronauts who have carried this flag.”
The flag has formally been awarded to Dr Pete Worden, Executive Director, of Breakthrough Starshot, and a former director of NASA Ames Research Center.
For more than 100 years, the flag has honored the most significant endeavors of human exploration. As an Explorers Club member for over a decade, I am honored to accept the flag on behalf of our TOLIMAN project.
Dr Pete Worden, Executive Director, of Breakthrough Starshot
We are exceptionally proud to partner in this mission. TOLIMAN is a first-of-its-kind exploration science effort and if successful, it will open the doors for cost-effective exploration and astronomy missions. It will bring opportunities to hundreds of next-gen exploration teams to realize their space missions. Bringing the cost and complexity down will open an array of new possibilities for space exploration and we are excited to push the limit of what’s possible.