RESEARCH: ESA TESTS WAYS OF ACCELERATING TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has launched a project to test whether technological advances can be speeded up. The Star Tiger project will bring together a small multidisciplinary team of European scientists to crack a key technological challenge in just four months. 'With Star Tiger we want to reduce dramatically the turnaround time for state-of-the-art technology developments,' said Niels Jensen, head of ESA's Technology Programme department. "By creating a highly-motivated team of researchers and experts and letting them work together in the same labs with all that's needed for an intense period, we will get an extra synergy not known in the conventional world of R&D (research and development), and a prospective of a key scientific breakthrough in a strategically...