New Student Experiments Selected for the REXUS/BEXUS Programme

The Swedish-German REXUS/BEXUS Programme has selected new student teams to participate in the upcoming flight missions. These teams will have the unique opportunity to design and develop their own experiments for a launch aboard a stratospheric balloon or a sounding rocket.

Following a competitive call for proposals, where a variety of high-quality experiments were submitted by student teams from across Europe, 13 teams were invited to ESA-ESTEC, the European Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands. During a selection workshop held from November 26th to 28th, 2024, the teams had the chance to pitch their ideas to a panel of experts.

The workshop was attended by almost 70 students representing 15 different ESA member states, associated member states and Canada. Before presenting their projects, the participants received valuable training in project planning, risk management, defining requirements, and documenting space projects.

The selection panel, consisting of engineers and scientists from the European Space Agency (ESA), the Swedish National Space Agency (SNSA), the Swedish Space Corporation (SSC), the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM), and the German Space Agency’s (DLR) mobile rocket base (MORABA), faced a challenging decision due to the high quality of the proposals and limited slots on the launch vehicles. After careful evaluation, 10 experiments were selected for sponsorship by SNSA and ESA.

These chosen teams will now move forward in developing their experiments for the upcoming REXUS/BEXUS programme steps.

The experiments selected for a flight on the BEXUS 36/37 stratospheric balloons are:

- EVE CURiE (ExtraVehicular Energy from Composite photovoltaics Undergoing Radiation Exposure) from the Warsaw University of Technology (WUT), Poland

- GLITCH (Gamma Light Interference in Technological Circuitry and Hardware) from the Luleå University of Technology, Sweden

- OSTRICH (Observation System Tracking Radiation Incidence through Correlation Heuristics) from the Eindhoven University of Technology and Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands

- Project Svarog 2 (Deployment and Rotation testing a CubeSat-like Solar Sail) from the Imperial College London, United Kingdom

- RATATOSK (Radiometric Analysis for Thermal Animal Tracking with Optimized Streaming utilizing K-band technology) from the University of Southern Denmark, Denmark

- SOBER (Space Object Brightness Evaluation and Reference) from the University of Waterloo, Canada

- SUNFLOWER (SUN FLux Optimized Wide-ranging Efficient Radiator) from the University of Padova, Italy

The experiments selected for a flight on the sounding rockets REXUS 35/36 are:

- APEX (Auroral Polarization EXperiment) from the University of Graz, Austria

- HARTS (Hybrid Atmospheric Re-entry Thermal Shield) from Technical University of Košice, Slovakia

- VIPER (Vibro-mechanical and Inertial Positioning Experiment on Rocket) from University La Sapienza, Italy

During a parallel selection workshop held at the German Space Agency at DLR in Bonn, Germany, additional eight teams have been selected to participate under DLR sponsorship. These teams are:

- SETH (Scintillation Event Triggering Hodoscope) from CAU Kiel

- SHAREon (Sensors for High Altitude Research Experiment – Optical Navigation) form EAH Jena

- CRAB (Communication via Retroreflectors and ABsorption modulators) from TU Dresden

- GOOSE (Germanium Orbital Optical Semiconductor Experiment) from TU München

- MARTINI (Material Analysis of Resin Testing In Null-Gravity Interactions) from TU Braunschweig

- TRACER (TRAnspiration Cooling Experiment Revisited) from RWTH Aachen

- MEEGA (Make Enceladus Experiment Go Again)from FH Aachen

- THRIVE (Tissue Healing Research for In-Flight Viability Experiment) from TH Würzburg

The next step for the selected teams is to begin refining their preliminary design before they travel to DLR Oberpfaffenhofen for a full week of training and Preliminary Design Reviews. This is the start of a long journey with the REXUS/BEXUS programme, which supports the teams through a full project’s life cycle that includes a series of reviews, integration and testing, launch and operation, and analysis/communication of results.

The REXUS/BEXUS programme is realised under a bilateral Agency Agreement between the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Swedish National Space Agency (SNSA). The Swedish share of the payload has been made available to students from other European countries through a collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA). EuroLaunch, a cooperation between the Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) and the Mobile Rocket Base (MORABA) of DLR, is responsible for the campaign management and operations of the launch vehicles. Experts from DLR, SSC, ZARM and ESA provide technical support to the student teams throughout the project. REXUS and BEXUS are launched from SSC, Esrange Space Center in northern Sweden.