ESA Graduate Trainee in the Space Safety Programme - Planetary Defence Office

Our team and mission

The ESA Space Safety Programme Office takes care of all potential hazards from space or in space, which can impact human activities on Earth or again in space. The spectrum of tasks ranges from gathering the basic understanding of space hazards originating from our Sun, from man-made space debris, or from asteroids potentially colliding with the Earth. It also addresses basic approaches to mitigate these hazards and to implement space systems end-to-end in a sustainable and eco-compatible way. Moreover, several corner stone missions are underway to demonstrate basic methods of space weather forecasting, asteroid deflection and active space debris removal from orbit.

The Planetary Defence Office (PDO) is addressing the tasks related to “…prediction and detection [of] the potential impact of a near-Earth object (NEO)”. Concerning the information needs for NEO monitoring, the following are defined:

• knowledge of the current and future positions of all near-Earth objects above a given size threshold or risk level, in particular their minimum fly-by distance to the Earth and time of this event;
• maintain awareness of collision risks with the Earth;
• access to verifiable, dependable, timely data with integrity and known accuracy.

You are encouraged to visit the ESA website: http://www.esa.int

Field(s) of activity/research for the traineeship

In December 2022 the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellite, an ESA-EUMETSAT cooperation mission, was launched from Kourou. One of the instruments in the satellite is the Lightning Imager (LI), which started operations in July 2023. Aside of the detection of lightning, the LI is capable of detecting the fireballs provoked by the atmospheric entry of meteoroids. Current instrument data pipelines are aimed at producing lightning products, leaving any trace of fireballs filtered out and thus undetected.

ESA’s Planetary Defence Office is very much interested in the implementation of a science data pipeline to automatically process the information provided by MTG’s LI to detect meteoroid fireballs and thus exploit a treasure trove of asteroid information contained in the LI data products.

At this point, the utilisation of MTG-LI for fireball detection has been manually demonstrated for a number of cases by other ESA team, clearly identifying the potential for the systematic exploitation of the instrument products. For example, this was recently done in the case of the fireball over Spain and Portugal that was widely observed on 18 May 2024. That case was a fantastic benchmark of what could be achieved with the information that the MTG-LI can gather on a continuous real-time basis. It can be pointed out that NASA does this operationally since mid-2017 using two GOES satellites, and they provide the results live in a dedicated web portal. Another example of meteor detection in LI data concerned the re-entry of a space debris over the Atlantic Ocean, linked to the Chinese QueQiao-2 mission.

The present proposal targets the incorporation of a ESA Graduate Trainee to the Planetary Defence Office team at ESOC in order to enable the systematic exploitation of the fireball data contained in the MTG-LI products. You will analyse the information content on the instrument data products, design a processing algorithm, develop the needed data pipeline (at the processing level considered of interest) and deploy a web portal to make that information available to the planetary scientists in Europe and to the international scientific community. The results of such pipeline should be displayed in a dedicated MTG-LI fireballs page.

You will have the chance to acquire knowledge of Planetary Defence in general, meteoroid imminent impactors, and the tools used by the PDO in order to assess the threats from asteroids. You will also have the chance to learn how to process the associated scientific data and to develop a related data pipeline. Furthermore, you will also get acquainted with the skills to display the obtained information in a dedicated web service. You will be integrated in our Planetary Defence multidisciplinary team and learn from the difference areas of activity in the group.

The MTG Project section at ESTEC would contribute with initial mentoring on the processing of the MTG-LI data and consultancy during the traineeship. In addition to that, the Planetary Defence Office has gathered the collaboration of EUMETSAT’s MTG-LI Team which would contribute with initial training on the instrument operations and data processing, as well as additional consultancy during the project.

Technical competencies

Behavioural competencies

Result Orientation

Operational Efficiency

Fostering Cooperation

Relationship Management

Continuous Improvement

Forward Thinking

For more information, please refer to ESA Core Behavioural Competencies guidebook

Education

You should have just completed, or be in the final year of your master’ s degree in physics, engineering or in science data processing.

Additional requirements

You should have good interpersonal and communication skills and should be able to work in a multicultural environment, both independently and as part of a team. Previous experience of working in international teams can be considered an asset. Your motivation, overall professional perspective and career goals will also be explored during the later stages of the selection process. 

Good knowledge of Python

Knowledge of fireball processes is an asset

Knowledge of celestial mechanics is an asset