ESA Internship

Two weeks at the European Space Agency in Grade 9. Work focused on attitude control systems for BepiColombo and LISA Pathfinder, analyzing satellite positioning data and contributing to backup system improvements. Also directed a simulated satellite launch exercise as Director General, which is a strange thing to do at 15 but genuinely useful for understanding mission operations at a systems level.

Do useful work on real spacecraft systems with two weeks of access and a high school physics background.

• Two-week duration with a steep ramp-up required on attitude control and mission operations
• Working with flight software and documentation not designed for external interns

• Focused on the attitude control subsystem rather than trying to cover the full mission stack. Depth over breadth given the time available.
• Used the simulated launch exercise to build intuition for operations tradeoffs under time pressure

1. 01

   Mission architecture orientation for BepiColombo and LISA Pathfinder

2. 02

   Attitude control data analysis and backup satellite system review

3. 03

   Simulated satellite launch exercise directed as internal training scenario

• Real spacecraft operations are dominated by edge case handling and redundancy logic. Almost none of that shows up in textbook descriptions of a mission.
• The gap between simulation and flight software is larger than it looks from the outside