January 5, 2020 – In a recent interview, a member of a NASA team whose family heritage is Croatian, detailed how her current project will go to Mars in 2021

Croatians are not ones for invading other countries, let alone other planets. Although, that reputation doesn't take into consideration the can-do attitude of the Croatian diaspora.

It is by the hands of one member of the country's diaspora that Croatia will go to Mars in 2021. Sarah M. Milkovich is a planetary geologist of Croatian descent who works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Her family is originally from a small village near the border with Slovenia. In an interview conducted over recent days by Vecernji List's Zoran Vitas, Milkovich detailed that the project she is working on right now is a vehicle that will this year visit Mars.

Sarah M. Milkovich

“I am currently working on the Perseverance rover that will land on Mars in 2021,” she told Vitas. “I’ve been working on Perseverance since 2013 including devising ways to collaborate between scientists and designers in terms of planning what the rover will do on the surface of Mars every day.”

“Perseverance will explore a location on Mars where we think a billion years ago a river flowed and formed a lake," said Milkovich, who was also interviewed by TCN's Iva Tatic in summer 2020. "Rivers and lakes on Mars disappeared long ago, so today Mars is an extremely cold and dry planet.”

“The shapes of the surface and the chemical composition of the rocks that we observed from a spacecraft in orbit and from previous rovers and landers on Mars tell us that a billion years ago, Mars was warmer and had adequate conditions to support life,” she went on to say to Mr Vitas. “With Perseverance, we intend to look in these rocks for evidence of ancient bacterial life. This will be very difficult, so we will also collect and store rock samples that we will leave on the surface. The intention is to make a joint mission of NASA and ESA to bring these samples to Earth (in order) to study them.”

February 17, 2020 - The Permanent Representation of Croatia to the European Union has increased the number of staff during the Croatian presidency; one fact regarding space exploration still managed to make the news in Croatia today.

Gordan Duhaček writes for index.hr about four people out of the 150 listed on the Representation website are dedicated to the Exploration and Space. While the English version of the website doesn't offer that piece of information, on the Croatian site you can find the four diplomats listed under the section "Istraživanje i svemir".

Index.hr asked the Representation about the number of the staff working there, especially considering that the Slovenian Representation to the same institution includes around 60 diplomats, while the Austrian is only 30 people strong.

Bruno Lopandić, the spokesperson for the Representation replied that the increase of the number of people working for them is in line with the increase previously seen when other countries started their presidencies. That is, according to Lopandić, what happened to the Exploration and Space staff, as only one person was working on this topic, while with the presidency came the need to increase the number to four. Lopandić also lists that Finland and Austria had 6 diplomats in this department during their presidency, while Romania and Bulgaria had 5.

His answer to the question by index.hr about what those diplomats exactly do in their role is as circumspect and unspecific as you'd expect, but the more interesting fact is about the educational background of those four diplomats. Index.hr claims that all four of them have degrees in humanities and social sciences, and none of them have any experience with any STEM area, such as astronomy. The spokesperson doesn't find that problematic, answering that they needed to have the university diploma to get appointed, that they have experiences in EU projects and that they were additionally educated in meeting management. (But, apparently, not in any space, exploration or research topics). 

The statement from the Representation reminds us that their job is, among others, to increase the number of applications to the Horizon2020 program, as well as promote activities related to the outer space and using the technologies developed for the outer space, in order to increase the co-operation between the scientists and the economy.

Let's add to this that Croatia already has a Space Exploration Technology Centre, established in Sisak, very close to villages which still, to this day, don't have electricity.