ESA Graduate Trainee in System Engineering in the EnVision Project

Our team and mission

EnVision was selected by ESA’s Science Programme Committee as the fifth Medium-class mission in the Agency’s Cosmic Vision plan, with a launch in 2031 from ESA’s Spaceport in Kourou. EnVision will be the first mission to investigate Venus from its inner core to its upper atmosphere, characterising the interaction between its different envelopes: its atmosphere, surface/subsurface and interior. It aims to provide a holistic view of Venus, studying the planet’s history, activity, and climate. EnVision is an ESA-led mission in partnership with NASA, with NASA providing the Synthetic Aperture Radar (VenSAR) and Deep Space Network support for critical mission phases.

EnVision’s science payload consists of VenSAR, a dual polarisation S-band radar also operating as microwave radiometer and altimeter, which will map the surface of Venus; three optical spectrometers (VenSpec-M, VenSpec-U and VenSpec-H) designed to observe the surface and atmosphere of Venus; and the Subsurface Radar Sounder (SRS), a High Frequency (HF) sounding radar to probe the top kilometres of subsurface. These are complemented by a Radio Science investigation exploiting the spacecraft Telemetry Tracking and Command (TT&C) system to map the planet’s gravity field and constrain its internal structure, and to measure the composition and structure of Venus’ atmosphere.

The EnVision project team is responsible for implementing the EnVision mission, composed of all its elements (Spacecraft, Instruments, Ground Segment).

The role of the Mission System and Performance team within the EnVision project is to ensure that the mission will fulfil its mission requirements by rigorous requirements apportioning, defining and controlling interfaces between elements, and verifying the requirements by establishing end-to-end performance budgets, supported as needed by mission performance simulations. The team is directly interfacing with all stakeholders of the mission (industry, the mission operations center at ESOC in Germany, the Science Operations center at ESAC in Spain, the launcher provider, the science team and the instrument teams).

The mission and performance team develops and maintains mission-level tools and budgets (eg. Delta V budget,aerobraking scenarios), including mission performance simulators for both the aerobraking and scientific parts of the mission.
 

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

Field(s) of activity/research for the traineeship

You will be involved in different core functions of the Mission & Performance team, in particular:

• Support to aerobraking engineering

The aerobraking mission simulator is developed and maintained by the project team to support the assessment of aerobraking related performance and different corridor strategies evolutions which may occur post SRR, and used to specify the reference aerobraking corridor and the reference aerobraking environmental specification.
You will:

• contribute to the evolution of the existing Aerobraking simulator into a python-based environment to enable faster simulations, and contribute to extensive Monte Carlo analysis to assess the statistics of various environment parameters relevant to the Spacecraft, ahead of system PDR.
• be supporting the specification of the aerobraking corridor towards ESOC flight dynamics ahead of the ground segment requirement review. This work on aerobraking will allow the EGT to develop its system engineering skills, and will involve close collaboration with all key stakeholders of the mission (ESA project, operations and flight dynamics, industry and possibly instrument teams).

• Support to mission performance requirements verification

The verification of mission requirements requires elaborating specific simulations and building up performance budgets to properly capture the combination of all identified contributors.
You will:

• be involved in supporting the verification of mission-performance requirements related for instance to geo-location, doppler budget, coverage, stereo-topography overlap requirements, etc, in preparation for the mission SRR planned in early 2026. This work on the mission performance aspects of the mission will allow you to develop another core skill in the area of system engineering : requirements engineering (incl. verification), and  to interact also with the science team and instrument teams.

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 recently completed or be in the final year of your master’s degree in Space Systems Engineering.

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. 

You should be proficient in Python and should be able to work autonomously.