About Test Opportunities

The ESA Academy is offering student teams support with the preparation and execution of environmental testing of their student designed and built hardware through dedicated access to the CubeSat Support Facility (CSF). The Test Opportunities programme is an educational opportunity for University or other tertiary education institution student teams from an eligible state who would like to receive support and training in conducting an environmental test campaign. This opportunity is a response to the ESA Agenda 2025 ‘Open labs’ action, where ESA Education opens up access to its testing facilities and enables sharing of technical competences to support, through the training of students, the enhancement of European industrial competitiveness.

As part of this hands-on experience, teams will learn how science, engineering, product assurance and project management come together to make a test campaign successful. Students will be introduced to standard space project testing practices, which can be directly applied to the verification of their system under development or qualification. In this framework, they will also learn how to approach AIV activities, requirements verification and test documentation preparation

Want to apply?

Detailed Information on the available test windows, milestones and programme phases is captured on the programme timeline page.

Call for proposals are opened regularly, and the specific details of the application will be presented in the call. Teams are welcome to start looking at the Proposal Instructions page to get a first idea of what is expected from the application.

More about Test Opportunities

Selected teams will be granted access to conduct a test campaign at the CSF where they can make use of the Thermal Vacuum Chamber or Vacuum oven to recreate the vacuum and temperature conditions in space, and/or an Electrodynamic Shaker system to mimic vibrational loads experienced during launch.

The programme offers students the opportunity to verify equipment, payloads, experiments or entire nanosatellites before their ride to space or flight in other platforms. Students aspiring to conduct technological or scientific investigations requiring access to environmental facilities are also invited to apply. The proposal shall highlight how the test campaign will enable to produce valuable engineering and/or scientific results.

In their proposal, teams should describe what is the nature of their activity, which can range from the development of nanosatellites or subsystems, scientific research, technology demonstration, astrobiology experiment etc.

Looking for further information?

It is possible to register for the Information Session for potential applicants.

Furthermore, to address the different needs of educational satellite projects, the programme is flanked by other two opportunities:

• Fly Your Satellite!, which is opened for more advanced teams that want to benefit from ESA guidance during the later phases of the missions, starting from the verification up to the operations, with the possibility of receiving a sponsored launch opportunity.
• Design Booster, which is opened for teams with a preliminary design that want to benefit from support from ESA for the consolidation of their detailed design.

Complementary to the hands-on programme, the ESA Education Office offers training courses in collaboration with the ESA Academy’s Training Programme. The training weeks particularly aim at students and teams in early phases of satellite projects and include a CubeSats Concurrent Engineering Workshop and a CubeSat Hands-On Training Week.  More information about these sessions can be found on the ESA Academy’s training sessions in the Current and Future opportunities website.  

ESA is committed to achieving diversity and creating an inclusive professional environment. To this end, we welcome proposals and applications from all eligible candidates irrespective of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, beliefs, age, disability, or other characteristics. The ESA Academy strongly encourages inclusiveness within its programmes and within participating teams, which contributes to the enrichment of our programme.  

 Whenever possible, we seek to accommodate individuals with disabilities by providing the necessary support, either digitally or at the location of the training. In case of any questions or specific needs, please reach out to esa.academy@esa.int to get assistance or advice.

Are you interested in participating in the next Test Opportunities call? You can access all the information about this programme in the Educational Satellites website. 

To be updated on the latest news keep an eye on the ESA Education website and subscribe to the ESA Academy newsletter. For further information please contact us at cubesats@esa.int.

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