ESA Academy’s Orbit Your Thesis! programme

ESA Academy is the European Space Agency’s overarching educational programme for university students. It takes them through a learning path that complements their academic education by offering a tailored transfer of space knowledge and interaction with space professionals. As a result, students can enhance their skills, boost their motivation and ambitions, and become acquainted with the standard professional practices in the space sector. This happens through the two pillars of ESA Academy, the Training and Learning Programme and the Hands-on Programmes. The latter enables university students to gain first-hand, end-to-end experience of space-related projects. One of the latest additions to the portfolio of opportunities for university students is “Orbit Your Thesis!”. It offers bachelor, master, and PhD students the opportunity to design, build, test, and operate their experiment onboard the International Space Station. The experiment operates within the ICE Cubes Facility in ESA’s Columbus module, where it can operate for up to four months in microgravity. Throughout the programme students develop essential scientific, academic, and professional skills that will help them build their future careers. These skills include project management, risk identification and mitigation, problem-solving, and working within a diverse workplace. Participating teams will experience first-hand the project management process for space missions and participate in multiple reviews of their experiment and design throughout the programme. Participating students are supported and guided through the process by engineers and scientists from ESA, Space Applications Services, and members of the European Low Gravity Research Association. The programme schedule follows a similar path to many space-faring projects. The design, development, testing, launch preparation and operations are structured in a series of project phases and technical reviews. Participating teams are guided towards the subsequent milestones to pass the necessary safety reviews and achieve launch readiness. The first team that successfully sent up their ICE Cube is OSCAR-QUBE, a multidisciplinary team from the University of Hasselt in Belgium. Their experiment is the first diamond-based quantum magnetometer that ever operated in space. Thanks to the unique characteristics of their sensor, they have been mapping the Earth’s magnetic field from inside the Columbus module aboard the ISS without the need to be housed on the exterior. This paper will describe the various phases and technical aspects of the programme in more detail