ESTEC, Noordwijk, the Netherlands, August 25-29, 2008 (published in Euroavia News 03/2008)

A week at ESTEC – where rocket science gets real

The last week of August 2008, over 60 students from all over Europe gathered in the largest site of the European Space Agency (ESA) and its technical heart, ESTEC in Noordwijk, the Netherlands for the first ESA Student Workshop. The main subject was ‘System Engineering and Technology for Space Missions’.

The workshop was a unique opportunity to learn to know ESA and how the agency goes about realising its often complex and challenging missions. Docking the Columbus module to the International Space Station (ISS) or studying Mars’ surface with the Mars Express satellite requires years, sometimes decades, of preparing, studying, designing, reviewing and eventually building, testing, launching and operating the mission. A lot of these aspects were looked upon at the workshop, in lectures and visits.

Concurrrent Engineering

After an idea for a new mission is formulated and feasibility studies have shown that it can be built and flown, scientist and engineers come together at the Concurrent Engineering Facility (CDF). In a brand new room full of screens, camera’s and computers a mission design is formulated in a couple of sessions of four hours. Scientists, project leaders and specialists of every spacecraft subsystem discuss different options until, after most often a large number of iterations and simulations, a compromise is found. The mission now has got a preliminary trajectory, weight, propulsion system, solar array size etc. Because most subsystems depend heavily on the others’ specifications, this concurrent engineering method requires less time to formulate a basic design and the number of errors in it proves to be lower.

After this first design steps of a new mission, more detailed studies and the eventual assembly of engineering models and the actual spacecraft are outsourced to the European space industry. The models and the spacecraft they design and assemble then return to ESA’s test facilities, one of which is located at ESTEC.

Test Center

In space, in almost all cases, maintenance is impossible. That’s why the spacecraft has to prove it can survive the harsh conditions of its launch and its actual operational phase. This is done at several impressive facilities. For example, the Hydra is a hydraulic shaker that’s basically an earthquake generator. It uses up to 1.5 MW to simulate vibrations of several g’s in frequencies that can reach 100 Hz. In the Large European Acoustic Facility (LEAF), overall noise levels of 156 dB can be achieved to simulate launch noise conditions. And in the Large Space Simulator high vacuum and extreme temperatures can be simulated. The facility got its name for a reason: it has an overall volume of 2300 cubic metres. This testing is expensive, but for ESA’s highly complex missions that can be decades in the making, nothing less is required. Space is unforgiving to errors, and so are European taxpayers.

International Space Station

A visit to the Erasmus Center was another highlight. This center promotes the utilisation of the ISS by Europe’s science and technology research community. It contains a full size model of Columbus and scale models of the ISS itself and ATV. We also enjoyed a detailed 3D tour of the interior and exterior of the ISS.

The rest of the week

The bulk of our week was filled with more and less interesting lectures and lab visits about the space environment, how a mission trajectory is chosen, all of a spacecrafts subsystems, Europe’s launchers, future missions,… But of course, an international meeting like this is also a moment to get to know each other and have a lot of fun. Next, even better, editions are planned for the coming years. Stay tuned to the ESA Education website for dates and information, but also for more about other educational projects ESA is running, mainly hands-on experiences in which you can for example take your thesis project onto a parabolic flight campaign, or even help designing a satellite orbiting the Moon.