Intern in the Product Assurance and Safety Department

Our team and mission

The Product Assurance and Safety Department is responsible for the establishment and implementation of the ESA policy, requirements and standards with respect to quality. It is responsible for the provision of required expertise and support services to ESA projects, support Directorates and research activities in the Product Assurance and Safety disciplines, applied to all elements of space systems (ground and on-board), including hardware, software and humans. Product Assurance and Safety disciplines comprise Product Assurance management, technical risk management, dependability, safety, quality assurance, EEE components, parts materials and processes assurance, with support from the other TEC Departments engineering, expertise and laboratories. Furthermore, the Head of the Department is responsible for the supervision of the correct implementation of the Agency’s flight safety rules, planetary protection, nuclear safety and space debris safety (including re-entry safety) policies.

This section is in charge of the Reliability Availability Maintainability and Safety (RAMS) activities. The main activity is to provide RAMS support to the ESA projects. The section is also in charge of proposing and following R&D activities to maintain expertise in the RAMS domain. And finally the section is also providing support to Standardization, Trainings and organization of RAMS conferences / workshops.

For further information visit our web site: http://www.esa.int

Field(s) of activity for the internship

Topic: In-orbit Return of Experience (REX)

ESA Fleet In-orbit Return of Experience (REX): An important activity for the agency consists in monitoring in-orbit fleet, to retrieve relevant information for the design of future missions and also to refine the Dependability predictions.

The main objectives are:

• collaboration with ESA Operations to collect relevant in-orbit data, and investigate text mining capabilities,
• process the data, compare with design reliability predictions and develop statistical analysis,
• support the development, Validation and Population of the REX Digital Dashboard to improve the current display of the REX data and the extraction of the post-processed values and graphs.

Behavioural competencies

Result Orientation
Operational Efficiency
Fostering Cooperation
Relationship Management
Continuous Improvement
Forward Thinking

Education

You must have student status and be enrolled at university for the entire duration of the internship. You should preferably be in your final or second to last year of a university course at master’s level in a technical or scientific discipline.

Additional requirements

The working languages of the Agency are English and French. A good knowledge of one of these is required. Knowledge of another Member State language would be an asset.

Educational knowledge: Knowledge and background in System Engineering and Reliability Availability Maintainability and Safety (RAMS) would be an asset.