Past opportunities 2019

Post-Alpbach School Summer School Event 2019

Description: Students get the opportunity to carry on working on one of the missions proposed by a team during the Alpbach Summer School 2019 on the “Geophysics from Space Using Micro- or Nano-Satellite Constellations”. The objective of this event is to further the design of this mission using the Concurrent Engineering approach. Students are supported by ESA and external experts whilst using the ESA Academy's Concurrent Design Facility (CDF).

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Concurrent Engineering Challenge 2019

Challenge delivered.

Date: 11 – 15 November 2019

Description: The ESA Academy Concurrent Engineering Challenge featured groups of up to 30 students, each one supervised by two system engineers in the four Concurrent Engineering Facilities (CEF) located in three European universities, respectively: Cranfield University (United Kingdom), Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) and the ESA Academy’s Training and Learning Facility (Belgium). Groups were given a specific mission to design in four days.

Students in each group were divided into small teams of two to four people to cover the following disciplines: structures, configuration, power, mechanisms, thermal, attitude and orbit control, propulsion, trajectory analysis, communications and data handling. Students within each small team created a subsystem concept in order to achieve the mission parameters using the Concurrent Engineering approach.

The groups did not compete against each other. Instead, they used video conferencing to share each day’s progress, raise any particular difficulties they are facing, and receive helpful input from the other participants. At the end of the week, each group presented their final design.

Ultimately, students involved in the Challenge learnt about the Concurrent Engineering approach and its benefits, the Open Concurrent Design Tool (OCDT) and how ESA performs the technical and financial feasibility of space missions.

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CubeSats Hands-on Training Week 2019

Description: During this 5-day training week, the university students learnt about small satellite design and testing through hands-on exercises on a CubeSat training model, the ESAT. These lab sessions were supervised by Theia Space and were complemented by technical lectures, delivered by ESA experts. The aim of this Training Week was to allow university students, who are involved in a CubeSat mission or would like to develop one, to get acquainted to the hardware and software of a CubeSat and to the assembly, integration and verifications of a small satellite as well as all the testing required.

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Ladybird Guide to Spacecraft Operations Training Course 2019

Description: Taught by an ESA expert from the Advanced Operations Concepts Office of ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC), Darmstadt, Germany, the course is delivered through formal lectures without excessive mathematics or technical jargon, but with a heavy emphasis placed on the interaction with the students. Students learn about:

• the challenges of operating a spacecraft (as opposed to designing a spacecraft)

• the operator’s view on all the spacecraft subsystems and the design features to implement in order to operate them

• ‘physiological’ traps to be avoided during operations and testing

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ESA-ELGRA Gravity-Related Research Summer School 2019

Description: During this four and a half day summer school, students are introduced to gravity-related research by ELGRA and ESA experts from across Europe. Throughout stimulating lectures about the current research under microgravity and hypergravity conditions in life and physical sciences, students appreciate the benefits of performing research at different g levels. Moreover, students work within small groups to come up with potential ideas for future gravity-related experiment student projects, also with the benefit of the existing ESA Educational platforms such as the parabolic flights, the human centrifuge or the ISS.

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Introduction to Space Law Training Course 2019

Description: During this five-day training course, students are provided with an introductory overview of space law, why it is necessary today to regulate space activities and how it applies practically to space missions, from the smallest of projects like a university’s CubeSat project, the most famous feats of space endeavours like human spaceflight and the International Space Station right through to forward-looking questions like planetary defence.

By the end of this programme, students appreciate the importance of law in the realisation of a space mission and they now have an overview of the international legal frameworks which governs the space activity today.

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Product Assurance Awareness Training Course 2019

Description: During this four-days training course, students are given an understanding of the PA&S engineer role in order to increase their awareness and the interest on PA&S and present them the different related disciplines. Throughout face-to-face lectures from several ESA’s PA managers and PA discipline experts, students understand that PA is an integral part of the engineering activities playing a role in the development, design, test philosophy, build and operation of the system.

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Standardisation Training Course 2019

Description: During this four-day training course, university students are given an introduction to ECSS system and taught the importance of using standards. They are also provided with an overview of how/why standards are used in different disciplines at ESA. Throughout face-to-face lectures from several ESA experts, students appreciate the importance of ECSS system, which will be an important part of their space-related career, complementing what they normally learn at university.

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Space Debris Training Course 2019

Description: During this five-day training course, the university students are provided with an introduction to the concept of space debris, why it is necessary to address this issue and how the mitigation policies set by ESA apply to missions. The students do not only learn about the space debris environment and mitigation technologies, but also about how it affects spacecraft’s operations and the issues and solutions foreseen in the future. Taught by ESA experts, mainly from the ESA Space Debris Office, as well as external experts from the sector, the course is delivered through formal technical lectures, which is complemented with hands-on exercises based on a real-life case study.

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Concurrent Engineering Workshop – May 2019

Description: Concurrent engineering is a method of designing and developing products in the space sector where all subsystems are designed simultaneously making the process more efficient. During this 4-day workshop, university students learn about concurrent engineering and its benefits, taking advantage of the use of the ESA Academy’s Concurrent Design Facility (CDF). Guided by ESA experts, the students first learn to use the Open Concurrent Design Tool (OCDT) and identify design drivers. They are then divided into groups of 2 or 3 to cover the several subsystems and, together with their groups, they create a subsystem concept in order to later achieve an already identified mission concept using concurrent engineering.

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Rosetta Science Operations Scheduling Legacy Workshop 2019

Description: During this workshop, university students learn how science operations scheduling is done at ESA and what tools are used. Exercises are performed with the support of the experts who did the scheduling for the real mission using the actual science operations scheduling software (MAPPS) that produced the final experiment commanding for the spacecraft. These exercises are complemented by lectures given by various members of the Rosetta team including the project scientist, spacecraft operations manager, ESA Philae system engineer and individuals who were involved in building the actual spacecraft. In addition, the students learn how to access the actual science data that these schedules produced via the Planetary Science Archive.

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Human Space Physiology Training Course 2019

Description: Two groups of university students are able to take part in this training course from two different ESA sites connected through videoconferencing: the ESA Academy’s Training and Learning Facility in ESEC-Galaxia, Belgium and the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany. Through face-to-face and videoconference lectures delivered from each location, students are introduced to the human physiological effects of spaceflight and to the approaches to mitigate the effects of microgravity on the human body with the use of analogues and models of the space environment. They are also involved in a group project addressing some of the major issues and challenges facing human spaceflight.

The students are introduced to the following topics:

• What it’s really like to live in space

• The challenges, lessons, and successes that have led to permanent occupation of the International Space Station,

• The conditions that the ISS provides to protect and support life

• How the senses perceive being ‘weightless’

• How key physiological systems respond to microgravity, what mechanisms underlie these changes, and some approaches that may be used to mitigate such effects

• Human space physiology research is performed both in space, and using Earth-based analogues

• Major issues and challenges facing current human spaceflight and future space exploration.

Concurrent Engineering Workshop – March 2019

Description: Concurrent engineering is a method of designing and developing products in the space sector where all subsystems are designed simultaneously making the process more efficient. During this 4-day workshop, university students learnt about concurrent engineering and its benefits, taking advantage of the use of the ESA Academy’s Concurrent Design Facility (CDF). Guided by ESA experts, the students first learn to use the Open Concurrent Design Tool (OCDT) and identify design drivers. They are divided into groups of 2 or 3 to cover the several subsystems and, together with their groups, they create a subsystem concept in order to later achieve an already identified mission concept using concurrent engineering.

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Ladybird Guide to Spacecraft Communications Training Course 2019

Description: Taught by an Advanced Operations & IOD Project Manager who works for the Operations Department of ESOC, the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, the course is delivered through formal lectures without excessive mathematics or technical jargon, but with a heavy emphasis placed on the interaction with the students.

University students learn about:

• the challenges of communicating with a spacecraft

• an operator’s view on all the spacecraft subsystems both on-board and on the ground

• ‘physiological’traps to be avoided during operations and testing

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Gravity-Related Experiments Training Week 2019

Description: The aim of this training week is to better prepare selected university student teams for their participation in the ESA Academy Hands-on Space Projects’ Fly Your Thesis!, Drop Your Thesis!, Orbit Your Thesis! and Spin Your Thesis! Programmes. By providing them with the information and basic knowledge that is required to design, develop, test, and perform a gravity-related scientific experiment or technology demonstration, students are helped to achieve their objectives. The idea is to optimize the transfer of know-how and expertise from the experts in the field to the students, before their experiment campaigns, through lectures, workshops and meetings with the experts. Hence, the objective is to increase the quality of collected data and the success rate of the students’ hands-on projects.

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CubeSats Concurrent Engineering Workshop 2019

Description: Students are introduced to the concurrent design of a CubeSat mission. Guided by ESA experts, the students learn to use the Open Concurrent Design Tool and identify design drivers. Divided into teams, they first create a subsystem concept to later achieve an already identified mission concept, function tree and product tree, using concurrent engineering. The workshop helps to better prepare those universities that are planning to embark on a CubeSat project or are at the early stages of one. Teams wishing to participate do not need to be at an advanced stage in their CubeSat project. They can be at a conceptual and/or preliminary phase of their CubeSat design.

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