ESA People
Meet your future colleagues and find out more about ESA people in our video collection. Wherever you are on your career path, and from student opportunities to professional, get to know us better and discover more about careers at ESA.
Entry-level and research programmes
The YGT Experience
Priya Patel, System Engineer, talks about her experience as a Young Graduate Trainee (YGT) working on the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna Mission (LISA).
Nicolas Soubirous, Spacecraft Operations Engineer, shares his Young Graduate Trainee (YGT) experience at ESA, working in the EarthCARE, SEOSat & SMOS Missions Operations Unit at ESOC, Germany.
Watch more videos: The YGT Experience
Learn more about the YGT Programme.
National Trainee Programmes
ESA trainee Sander Coene explains the significance of virtual reality and its potential for future space exploration and robotics training. Sander and members of the training division at ESA’s astronaut centre in Cologne, Germany, have developed a platform called VORTEX (Virtual Reality Options for Robotics Training Expansion), which is now being used to test concepts for how astronauts might work with robotics on the lunar surface.
Learn more about the National Trainee Programmes.
Research Fellowship Programme
In 2018, Ginevra Favole was an ESAC research fellow working on the large-scale structures of the universe. Her main scientific field is emission-line galaxies, galaxy clustering and weak gravitational lensing. She also worked with mock catalogues and N-body cosmological simulations.
In 2018, Maggie Lieu was an ESAC research fellow working on Euclid, a visible and near-infrared space telescope due to launch in 2021. By measuring the shapes of distant galaxies we can determine the mass of the largest systems in the Universe, galaxy clusters. Euclid will achieve unprecedented shape measurements of galaxies covering almost half of the extragalactic sky. Maggie was developing statistical methods to deal with this upcoming big, noisy dataset, so that we can better understand the physics of galaxy clusters and their role in the Dark Universe.
Learn more about the Research Fellowship Programme
Meet our teams
We conducted interviews with people from across the agency to share their first-hand experiences of life at ESA.
Natacha Callens, the Administrator for ESA Academy’s Training and Learning Programme
“Since my internship at EAC during my studies, I promised myself that one day I would work for ESA. At that time, I knew I wanted to make a career in the space sector and I was attracted by this international environment, full of passionate people where the “big” decisions for the future of space in Europe were taken and where I would be able to keep in contact with research and collaborate with industry.”
Maris Tali, On-Board Data Processing Engineer based at ESTEC
“At ESA, you have access to a large amount of expertise in various fields related to space and it is therefore a great place to develop yourself professionally. The research and development (R&D) work that is being done by Research Fellows for the TEC Directorate is based on what is being done for ESA missions or used by companies in the European space industry, so their research has real tangible benefits for both the Agency and the industry, which is one of the unique benefits of working here.”
Max Ghiglione, Digital Payload Engineer based at ESTEC
“I knew that moving from industry to an agency would mean a change in mindset in terms of how projects and technical work are addressed, but I didn’t expect that ESA would allow such freedom regarding which activities to focus on… ESA is one of the few places in Europe where you can meet colleagues from all Member States and work with companies from all over Europe, which makes it a unique place to work.”
Short film: The Burn
The Burn is a short film that tells the story of what happens when an ESA mission control team encounters an unexpected anomaly in what should be a routine manoeuvre. ESA’s flight controllers use the best software and systems to fly our missions -- but do they have the cool savvy needed to handle a wonky engine and a time-critical manoeuvre? Set in the near future, ‘The Burn’ is a new short film that tells the story of what happens when an ESA mission control team encounters an unexpected anomaly in what should be a routine manoeuvre.
Many of the actors appearing in ‘The Burn’ are the actual engineers currently flying missions at ESA, giving an authentic glimpse into the real-time experiences of the teams who fly European exploration spacecraft today.
ESA Masterclass series with Paolo Ferry : Leadership at Mission Control
In the first of the Masterclass series, we head to Darmstadt, Germany, where epoch-making robotic space exploration missions have been flown under the watchful eye of one man, Paolo Ferri. With 36 years’ of experience at ESA, Paolo Ferri is responsible for mission operations, and he has played a leading role in ensuring the success of missions like Eureca, ESA’s first-ever reusable satellite; Cluster, one of the longest-flying science missions; Venus Express, Europe’s first exploration of Earth’s ‘evil twin’; and Rosetta, humanity’s first landing on a comet.
In ‘Thinking Outside the Box,” Paolo describes three missions that suffered unexpected and potentially fatal flaws: Smart-1, Cluster and Exosat, and how on-the-ground knowledge, innovation and ingenuity prevented their untimely demise, allowing the science to go on.
In five episodes of ‘Leadership at Mission Control’, Paolo takes us through major events in his career at ESA, covering cornerstone missions, first attempts, overcoming technical challenges, building diverse teams, working under pressure and solving the unexpected problems that are part of any space endeavour.
Access the other episodes of ‘Leadership at Mission Control’.
Meet the Experts
Will robots replace humans one day? When it comes to space exploration, robots are our precursors, gathering data to prepare humans for deep space. ESA robotics engineer Martin Azkarate discusses some of the upcoming missions involving robots and the unique science they will perform in this episode of Meet the Experts.
For more information about robotics, visit: http://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Technology/Automation_and_Robotics
Watch more videos from the series Meet the ESA experts.
ESA Web TV
Interested in learning more about ESA? Watch our ESA Web TV or our ESA videos on demand.
