Fly Your Satellite! students complete training week at ESEC-Galaxia
In brief
30 students from the four newly selected Fly Your Satellite! teams travelled to ESA’s educational centre in Belgium to participate in the first element of the programme – an intense training week.
In-depth
The four teams from Canada, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands were informed of their selection in March following an intense selection process and were ready and waiting for this important first element of the programme.
The participating students travelled to ESEC-Galaxia in Belgium where they were met with a concentrated training week consisting of lectures, hands-on training and site visits. The primary purpose of the training week is to prepare the teams for the next steps of the projects, the so called ‘AIV’ stage or Assembly, Integration and Testing. It’s in this stage that the teams will begin the assembly of their satellite before performing both functional and environmental testing to ensure their satellite will work once deployed into space.
The lectures included diverse topics such as thermal and structural verification, and Product Assurance presented by experts from ESA’s technical site ESTEC, as well as further explanations about the next elements of the Fly Your Satellite! programme.
During the week students were also treated to a tour of the nearby ESEC-Redu site, among many other things the home of ESA’s Proba’s mission control centre. Here they learnt more about the important ground stations hosted by ESA, as well as meeting the Proba operations manager to hear more about this interesting small satellite mission.
The latter part of the week focused on an exercise on verification and testing. The students were split into teams, mixing between their usual CubeSat/PocketQube teams and were tasked with the preparation and execution of a thermal or structural test of a provided test item – a CheerSat. This meant the students first had to work together in new international teams, but also that they had to quickly become familiar with the process of verification and assembly planning, as well as the realities of performing environmental testing in a real space laboratory.
Once the planning was complete, the teams conducted the tests in the CubeSat Support Facility. The teams had then to analyse their results before presenting their findings to the group.
The students, equipped with the knowledge needed for the next stages of their projects, now head back to their respective universities to press on with their exciting space projects.