Meet the ESA Teach with Space Experts

Angelique Van Ombergen, ESA

This session will take you on an amazing journey to our next destinations in space, both near and far.

ESA’s future for human spaceflight and robotic exploration is a sustainable and international endeavour to visit new places and discover new things. Exploring space is about travelling farther and coming back with new experiences and knowledge to help us on Earth.

Angelique Van Ombergen coordinates ESA’s biology and health research activities across several space environments, such as the International Space Station and on parabolic flights. She is an expert on the limits of the human body in space.

Tiago Soares, ESA

This session will give you a glimpse into some of the most pressing sustainability challenges for the space industry.

Tiago Soares of ESA’s Clean Space Office develops technologies for reducing the environmental impacts of space activities in orbit and on the ground. The clean space initiative is working to eliminate substances that pollute the terrestrial environment and find ways to ensure that no garbage is left behind in space either.

Kavitha Muthu, ESA

Space technologies are everywhere, making sure traffic flows smoothly or monitoring air quality, to name a few applications. In this session, Kavitha Muthu, coordinator of ESA’s Smart Cities Working Group for downstream applications, will provide an overview of how can space technologies contribute to smarter cities on Earth. She will present some case study examples on satellite communications, Earth observation and satellite navigation.

As a technical Officer within ESA, Kavitha supports industry in ESA Member States to develop innovative and commercially viable services using space technologies.

Nora Lützgendorf, ESA

On 25 December 2021, ESA launched the highly anticipated James Webb Space Telescope, the largest space telescope in history. With a never-before-seen view of the first bursts of starlight in the universe, Webb will look back in time to help uncover the mysteries of early star birth and galaxy formation.

In this session, Nora Lützgendorf will unveil some of the Webb’s extraordinary capabilities. Nora is an astronomer working on the Webb telescope’s NIRSpec instrument.

Hannah Goldberg, ESA

In a year that saw planetary defence become a hot topic in popular culture, we will present the real state-of-the-art in our planetary defence capabilities.

Hannah Goldberg is a Payload Systems Engineer for the Hera spacecraft, a mission that will attempt to deflect an asteroid for the first-time.

Along with NASA's DART, Hera – named after the Greek goddess of marriage – will be humankind’s first spacecraft to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system.

Frank De Winne, ESA astronaut / Head of ESA’s European Astronaut Centre

Are you curious about what the real astronaut experience is like? In this session Frank will present his unique perspective on Earth from space, giving you the opportunity to ask all the questions you may have on life as an astronaut.