ESA Graduate Trainee in RAMS (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety)

Our team and mission

The mission of the Quality and Product Assurance Management Division is to contribute to the success of ESA projects and activities by providing expert support, disseminating knowledge in its areas of responsibility, and establishing quality management systems within ESA. The disciplines covered by the division include system safety, dependability (i.e. reliability, availability and maintainability), quality assurance and quality management, and software quality. Quality assurance, safety and dependability engineering are primarily concerned with the development and implementation of methods, techniques and processes to achieve confidence in a safe and reliable system design, manufacturing, operation and disposal.

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

Field(s) of activity/research for the traineeship

You will contribute to the following activities: “Exploitation of ESA Missions In-orbit data, through the Return of Experience (REX) in support to Mission design optimisation and Space Sustainability”

• A dedicated tool (named REX Digital Dashboard) has been developed to collect and manage the ESA Missions in-orbit data. The first objective is to continue populating the tool to cover all the flying missions, in collaboration with ESA Operations team. It will include the follow-up for development of enhanced functionalities (Anomaly report Text mining) supported by external company;
• The collected data are exploited to perform statistics in terms of Reliability and Availability and take-away RAMS lessons learnt to optimise future ESA missions. The second objective is to derive the relevant statistics in terms of Reliability and Availability at Satellite and lower levels (i.e. subsystem and equipment) when possible;
• Given the manifested interest shared by other agencies, a prospect to build a common data collection is foreseen. The third objective is to define the framework and take inputs / constraints of the different agencies to build a common data base of in-service experience;
• The RAMS team is also supporting the implementation of the ESA Zero Debris Policy, in particular by computing the Probability of successful disposal of Satellite. The fourth objective is to update the Satellite Reliability and Probability of successful disposal of ESA flying missions in support to potential mission extensions.

In addition, you will have the opportunity to support the following activities:

• Provide Project support: for the Science Mission LISA, you will support the Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA) integration and the Model Based Mission Assurance (MBMA) implementation for some Payload equipment;
• Support the Technical Risk assessment for early phase concurrent engineering for space missions.

The Learning Objectives are:

1. Strengthen knowledge about the RAMS Discipline;
2. Strengthen knowledge about System Engineering and Space Systems design;
3. Discover Project development cycle through Project support.

Technical competencies

Behavioural competencies

Result Orientation

Operational Efficiency

Fostering Cooperation

Relationship Management

Continuous Improvement

Forward Thinking

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

Education

You should have just completed, or be in the final year of your master’ s degree in RAMS or System 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. 

Aerospace degree would be an asset.