About the ESEO mission at last Space Academy Club event

2019-01-02

A few years ago, the Hungarian Astronautical Society (MANT) and the Space Generation Advisory Council (SGAC) launched a series of events, named Space Academy Club, primarily for the age group of 18-35. The last such event in 2018 took place on December 13, at the Eötvös Loránd University, where the second lecture was given by Boglárka Erdős, junior researcher of our group, with the title ESEO, the Student Space Program of the European Space Agency.

Boglárka, a PhD student in the research group, joined the ESEO student satellite programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) Education Office in 2018. The ESEO satellite was launched in December 2018, after more than a decade of rugged, but persistent development work. This was also reported on our website. During this time, more than 600 students could join the programme to gain hands-on experiences of the scientific and engineering work required to develop a spacecraft in international collaboration.

The participation of Hungarian students in the program is significant. The ESEO Power Distribution Unit (PDU), a fundamental spacecraft subsystem designed to distribute electrical power to the whole ESEO on-board instrumentation (subsystems and payload), was developed by the ESEO-PDU team from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Two of the three scientific payloads were also designed by student teams from Hungary. The ESEO-TRITEL team supported by the Centre for Energy Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA EK) developed the ESEO-TRITEL three-axis silicon detector telescope to study the radiation environment above the Earth atmosphere. It is the first of its kind to fly on a satellite mission: it is designed for continuous autonomous operations, while previous models always having been linked to manned space flights. The ESEO-LMP team developed a Langmuir Probe sensor to study the plasma (gas of charged particles) in the Earth ionosphere.

Boglárka Erdős, junior researcher at MTA EK presenting the ESEO student satellite programme at the last MANT Space Academy Club event of 2018. Besides the history of the ESEO programme, she shared her own personal experiences in the programme with the participants (credits: urvilag.hu).

The Hungarian Űrvilág space news portal reported that the talks at the event were followed by an exciting Q&A session with the enthusiastic participants of the MANT Space Academy Club. The event was closed by informal conversation at a nearby bar where the presenters and their audience could continue their discussion.

Hírek