A GRADUATE OF VFU "CHERNORIZETS HRABAR" IS A FINALIST IN A NASA COMPETITION
10 December 2020
Kalina Kalcheva - a graduate of Varna Free University "Chernorizets Hrabar", is a finalist and will represent Bulgaria in a NASA competition.More than 5,000 participants from all over the world took part in the initial competition. With her development of a base on Mars, Kalcheva was invited to participate in a 3-month training at Mars University in California. The competition was organized by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Mars Society was held in February, but due to the pandemic, the results were announced a few days ago.
Kalina Kalcheva says that she has worked on the project for six years, the last three years together with Assoc. Prof. Yavor Shopov, PhD - her research consultant. He helped Kalina present the combination of her two passions - astronomy and architecture. With a work dedicated to Mars, Kalina Kalcheva graduated from VFU "Chernorizets Hrabar" in 2019. Its research supervisors were Assoc. Prof. Yanko Milev, PhD and Assoc. Prof. Nikolay Ninov.
Kalina Kalcheva has been interested in astronomy since her school years; with friends from the secondary school they attended a circle at the Nicolaus Copernicus Observatory, where her mentors were Ivanka Getsova and Eva Bozhurova. Kalina Kalcheva is a graduate of the First Language Secondary School in Varna; she graduated from VFU "Chernorizets Hrabar" in the seaside city. She has participated in numerous national and international conferences on astronomy and astrophysics, the VarnaUtre news agency reported.
Mars University is an international research and academic organization based in Los Angeles, California. Their mission is to bring together students, researchers and professionals from multidisciplinary fields and curricula to populate humans on Mars. Their team consists of 15 lecturers and leaders from various fields, who are organizing the first five-week programme dedicated to Mars in July 2021. The programme is aimed at upper year students, graduates and professionals.
