Interested in applying? You should then follow the following steps:

• Identify and consult the endorsing professor or academic supervisor, who preferably should be your thesis or project supervisor.
• Compose a team with other students who have interest in working together for their thesis or project.
• Register on the ESA Education Office's project portal. Your endorsing professor and all the team members should register on the website. Please note that the lack of information (or wrong information) in the registry can be a cause for rejection.
• Define your project, discuss it and try to find references in the scientific literature about similar research projects.
• Write an experiment proposal following the template to be found under the documents links. Please follow closely the instructions below.
• Ask your endorsing professor or academic supervisor to write a formal letter of endorsement in which he shows his support to all the team members and your proposed project. More specifically, the endorsing professor or academic supervisor should clearly state in this letter that he supports the students’ application and that he accepts responsibility for their Spin Your Thesis! project.
• If you are a citizen of a Cooperating State, obtain a letter of endorsement from your national agency stating that you will be supported financially throughout the programme. Contact ESA’s Education Office for further details if needed.
• Access the project portal, apply for the programme and upload all the documents.

Instructions for the experiment proposal

The experiment proposal should focus on the scientific and/or technology-related objectives of the project and on the technical details for the implementation of the experiment. In other words, participants are invited to explain what they intend to investigate and how they are going to implement their experiment.

Prior to completing this experiment proposal template, teams should carry out some research of the scientific literature to see whether some work has already been done on the same topic or one that is similar. References to the literature are essential in order to demonstrate that teams are fully informed about the current status of research in this field.

The experiment proposal must also explain the relevance of hypergravity to the project and - more particularly - the relevance of using the Large Diameter Centrifuge as a means of achieving its objectives. It should be noted that this facility offers a range of hypergravity levels, from 1 to 20 g.

It is extremely important that applicants explain in full detail how the proposed experiment is related to their syllabi. They should indicate which academic projects they are involved in and how their proposed experiment would be relevant to these projects.

The text of the proposal should be intelligible to scientists of various fields and engineers with a general science background. Please complete all the fields in the experiment proposal document. Then upload to ESA Education Office's project portal, in a single zip file, both this document and the letter of endorsement.