School students become Space Engineers for a day
21 June 2024
Would you like to be a Space Engineer when you grow up? Designing, developing, and testing spacecraft sounds like a dream job! In June 2024, a group of eager secondary school students were lucky enough to visit the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in The Netherlands, to experience life as Space Engineers!
The students were winners from 24 countries taking part in ESA’s CanSat competition. This saw school students design, test, and launch mini-satellites the size of a soda can! It was a real challenge to make scientific craft so small, but the teams worked hard and achieved their goals. Here are some of the winning teams, and their missions:
- ST4A, from France: measuring the hardness of the ground to know if a vessel can land safely.
- GranSat IV, from Spain: detecting forest fires and nearby water, to help rescue services.
- Hermesat, from Portugal: an environmentally friendly CanSat using artificial intelligence to find a safe landing spot.
Visiting ESTEC and becoming Space Engineers for a day was part of a celebration of all the students had achieved. They explored ESTEC and met lots of ESA space experts, before being challenged to design a mission – in just two hours! They worked well in their teams, agreeing on a plan to achieve the science goals of their mission and the specifications of their spacecraft. They needed to communicate well, and work under pressure – just like real Space Engineers!
Finally, the students learnt about future careers in ESA. Maybe they will become Space Engineers in the future, designing and operating exciting missions and making new discoveries!
Cool fact: to design missions in just two hours, the students used a special method called Concurrent Engineering, where all aspects of a mission are planned at the same time!
