Intern in the LEO Exploration Group

Our team and mission

The Human and Robotic Exploration Programmes, the Leader of the LEO Exploration Group shall manage the Agency’s human spaceflight activities in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and in particular as ESA ISS Programme Manager interface with the NASA ISS Programme and other NASA Managers for negotiations of Technical Understandings as well as represent ESA at the ISS Partner Multilateral Space Station Control Board (SSCB); Chair the Exploitation Management Board (EMB) in accordance with its charter, ensuring that ISS Programme change proposals are responded to in a correct and timely manner; Act as the operational service provider towards the Research and Utilisation Group (HRE-R) to ensure timely, efficient and successful implementation of the ISS Utilisation Programme; Define the Operational Sustaining Engineering functional requirements to support the operations of the Columbus System, Infrastructure and Payloads; among others.

Within ESA’s Human and Robotic Exploration directorate, the Ground Segment Systems Team holds responsibility over a wide range of critical ground-based IT systems and support services that are central to ground based European support for ISS operations. The team works to meet the needs of several communities across ISS operations, training, science and medicine. To serve these varied stakeholders, the team maintains and pursues numerous IT projects and services, many of which are central to successful activities involving European crew on-board the ISS. 

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

Field(s) of activity for the internship

Topic: System Engineering Software Automation

Requirements play an essential role in space systems engineering. Big-picture ideas for projects and missions ultimately lead to a number of detailed statements (requirements) which describe how an idea will become reality. Certain major projects will often have well in excess of 1,000 detailed requirements. Requirements are often recorded in Word and PDF documents which need to be updated regularly, versioned, and carefully structured to ensure that all persons working on the project know the latest state of the project’s requirements (i.e., the requirements baseline).
 

As space systems engineering practices and tools evolve, requirement management is increasingly shifting to the use of online databases which support collaborative editing. Evolving systems engineering standards and the emergence of model-based systems engineering (MBSE) practices are driving a transition from labour-intensive “document-centric” requirements management to “database-centric” requirements management.
 

This project will focus on developing software tools to extract, process, and import large portions of the engineering requirements which form the requirements baselines for the operation and development of ESA’s Columbus module on board the International Space Stations. The processed requirements data will be imported into an existing ESA database. The existing database has robust application programming interfaces (APIs). As such, this project will also include the development of tools seeking to automate various aspects of requirements management such as the analysis of requirements data, generation of reports and control of requirements changes.

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, background and practical experience in Python or a similar scripting language is an asset.
• Knowledge, background and practical experience in web API programming is an asset