Today's picture-perfect qualification flight of the new Vega rocket was a huge success for ESA but was a truly historic day for Hungary. Our first indigenous satellite, MaSat-1, designed and built at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, entered orbit today. This event represents the next highlight in a string of successful space activities, such as the spaceflight of Bertalan Farkas, successful cooperation in various programs, like the VEGA and Rosetta missions, or the Pille dosimeter that has served on three generations of space stations. We share the joy of today's successful launch with Poland and Romania who launched their first indigenous satellites on this flight too.

Two significant announcements happened lately, within a week: China released the complete lunar views of Chang'e-2, the highest-resolution map ever that covers the entire globe, in preparation for their upcoming landing attempts. Meanwhile NASA released the first views of the Moon of the MoonKAM educational cameras aboard the GRAIL space probes.

The two satellites were originally named GRAIL A and B which are rational but rather dull choices to be honest. So NASA issued a naming contest for American schoolchildren between ages 5 and 18. A whopping number of essays were received from 890 classrooms with more than 11000 students. The names were selected by Maria Zuber, the PI of the mission and Sally Ride former astronaut and leader of the MoonKAM educational program.

Puli Space participated in the grandiose end of the year gala of Google Hungary, not surprisingly as the parent company is the main sponsor of our competition. Since we were there, we brought a present too: the just completed lander mockup of our Iteration 2 / Hunveyor-15 project.

Tibor Pacher, our team leader and the lander mockup on stage.

NASA greeted the New Year in style: the two GRAIL spacecraft arrived to the Moon on New Year's Eve and Day, and after a 40-minute braking maneuver, each entered their preliminary orbits. The probes are currently on a wide elliptical orbit and further burns will bring them down to 50 km above the surface over the next two months. Once there, they will map the gravitational field of the Moon which will help to determine it's internal structure.