Garik Israelyan: Some Armenian scientists are likely to take part in new SATLANTIS project worth €200 million

Scientists from Armenia can take part in the Arakis project of the Spanish company SATLANTIS. It is one of the largest projects of the European Space Agency this year and is worth 200 million euros. Astrophysicist Garik Israelyan stated this on November 18 at the press conference devoted to the work of the first Armenian satellite.

"We need to set up a company, which will be able to manufacture very high-quality cameras for placing them on the satellite. There are not many such companies. "SATLANTIS is one of the leaders among such companies," he said.

The project is just getting off the ground, with a satellite launch scheduled for 2030.

The goal of the Arakis project is to find the source of dark matter in the universe, and to do this, the satellite must survey hundreds of galaxies and obtain very deep images. According to Israelyan, scientists can see little with optical telescopes; in fact, there is a very large mass next to galaxies that is invisible and impossible to see.

"Even if we build 100-meter telescopes on Earth, we are limited because our night sky is not black. To do this, we take the telescopes outside the Earth's atmosphere and there, using very high-precision optics, we study the galaxy's neighboring masses. The project will provide an opportunity to answer the question of where dark matter comes from. 90% of the Universe consists of dark matter, and we don't know what it is. This is the biggest problem of modern astrophysics", the scientist added.

Armenian state company "Geocosmos" cooperates with Spanish "SATLANTIS" company. Within the framework of this cooperation, the first satellite "ArmSat-1" was launched on May 25, 2022 by SpaceX from Cape Canaveral Space Station.