Hypergravity proposals requested for Spin Your Thesis! 2015
The ESA Education Office is issuing a call to university students who want to take advantage of next year’s opportunity to conduct hypergravity experiments.
The sixth SYT campaign, which will take place September-October 2015, is open to four teams of undergraduate, graduate and PhD students from ESA Member or Cooperating States.
The selected teams, each comprising up to four students, will be given the rare opportunity to conduct science or technology experiments under hypergravity conditions (between 1 and 20 times Earth’s gravity). These experiments must be linked to part of their academic syllabus.
SYT enables students to use ESA’s Large Diameter Centrifuge (LDC) facility, which is located at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. The facility is available for up to 2.5 days per team (with flexible time slots).
A review board composed of experts from ESA and ELGRA (European Low Gravity Research Association) will select the best experiment proposals to be performed in the LDC. ESA staff will provide technical support to the selected teams throughout the experiment design and completion. In addition, ELGRA will offer students the opportunity to consult a scientific mentor.
The ESA Education Office will provide financial support to cover part of travel, accommodation and/or hardware expenses.
The submission deadline for experiment proposals for SYT 2015 is 7 December 2014.
The value of Spin Your Thesis!
During the SYT programme, students not only have access to state-of-the-art research facilities, but also receive valuable feedback from ESA and ELGRA experts.
The programme enables participants to develop important practical skills through hands-on activities, as well as learning about project management, problem solving, development and testing of hardware / software.
As a direct consequence of the research they conducted during SYT campaigns, members of previous student teams have been able to present their results at international conferences and/or publish papers in leading scientific journals.
SYT also provides opportunities to work in an international environment and network with other students. The experience gained is an important addition to students’ curriculum vitae and increases their chance of being selected for future professional opportunities.
Videos of some previous SYT campaigns can be found here.
How to apply
Details of the Spin Your Thesis! 2015 campaign programme can be found on the ESA Education website.
Instructions on how to apply are available here.
For further information, please e-mail: spinyourthesis @ esa.int.
Spin Your Thesis! 2014
Last April, four teams from the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy were selected to participate in the ‘Spin Your Thesis!’ 2014 campaign, which will take place 8 – 19 September 2014.
Their experiments will examine the ability of endothelial cells to form blood vessels under hypergravity; study the energy demands of spicule body formation in sponges during germination; investigate mammalian cell transfection for regenerative medicine purposes; and test the influence of gravity on the flow properties of an ice-analogue material. You can read more about this here.
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* ESA Member States Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Poland, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and Canada (Associate Member). European Cooperating States Estonia, Hungary, Slovenia, Latvia Cooperating States Cyprus, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia |
