ESA Academy’s Orbit Your Thesis! programme

ESA Academy is the European Space Agency’s overarching educational programme for university students. It takes them through a learning path that complements their academic education by offering a tailored transfer of space knowledge and interaction with space professionals. As a result, students can enhance their skills, boost their motivation and ambitions, and become acquainted with the standard professional practices in the space sector. This happens through the two pillars of ESA Academy, the Training and Learning Programme and the Hands-on Programmes. The latter enables university students to gain first-hand, end-to-end experience of space-related projects. One of the latest additions to the portfolio of opportunities for university students is “Orbit Your Thesis!”. It offers bachelor, master, and PhD students the opportunity to design, build, test, and operate their experiment onboard the International Space Station. The experiment operates within the ICE Cubes Facility in ESA’s Columbus module, where it can operate for up to four months in microgravity. Throughout the programme students develop essential scientific, academic, and professional skills that will help them build their future careers. These skills include project management, risk identification and mitigation, problem-solving, and working within a diverse workplace. Participating teams will experience first-hand the project management process for space missions and participate in multiple reviews of their experiment and design throughout the programme. Participating students are supported and guided through the process by engineers and scientists from ESA, Space Applications Services, and members of the European Low Gravity Research Association. The programme schedule follows a similar path to many space-faring projects. The design, development, testing, launch preparation and operations are structured in a series of project phases and technical reviews. Participating teams are guided towards the subsequent milestones to pass the necessary safety reviews and achieve launch readiness. The first team that successfully sent up their ICE Cube is OSCAR-QUBE, a multidisciplinary team from the University of Hasselt in Belgium. Their experiment is the first diamond-based quantum magnetometer that ever operated in space. Thanks to the unique characteristics of their sensor, they have been mapping the Earth’s magnetic field from inside the Columbus module aboard the ISS without the need to be housed on the exterior. This paper will describe the various phases and technical aspects of the programme in more detai

OSCAR-QUBE: student made diamond based quantum magnetic field sensor for space applications

Project OSCAR-QUBE (Optical Sensors Based on CARbon materials - QUantum BElgium) is a project from Hasselt University and research institute IMO-IMOMEC that brings together the fields of quantum physics and space exploration. To reach this goal, an interdisciplinary team of physics, electronics engineering and software engineering students created a quantum magnetometer based on nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond in the framework of the Orbit-Your-Thesis! programme from ESA Education. In a single year, our team experienced the full lifecycle of a real space experiment from concept and design, to development and testing, to the launch and commissioning onboard the ISS. The resulting sensor is fully functional, with a resolution of < 300 nT/ sqrt(Hz), and has been gathering data in Low Earth Orbit for over six months at this point. From this data, maps of Earth’s magnetic field have been generated and show resemblance to onboard reference data. Currently, both the NV and reference sensor measure a different magnetic field than the one predicted by the International Geomagnetic Reference Field. The reason for this discrepancy is still under investigation. Besides the technological goal of developing a quantum sensor for space magnetometry with a high sensitivity and a wide dynamic range, and the scientific goal of characterizing the magnetic field of the Earth, OSCAR-QUBE also drives student growth. Several of our team members are now (aspiring) ESA Young Graduate Trainees or PhD students in quantum research, and all of us took part in the team competition of the International Astronautical Congress in October 2021, where we won the Hans Von Muldau award. Being an interdisciplinary team, we brought many different skills and viewpoints together, inspiring innovative ideas. However, this could only be done because of our efforts to keep up a good communication and team spirit. We believe that if motivated people work hard to improve the technology, we can change the way magnetometry is done in space

Gravitational effects on fibroblasts’ function in relation to wound healing

Abstract The spaceflight environment imposes risks for maintaining a healthy skin function as the observed delayed wound healing can contribute to increased risks of infection. To counteract delayed wound healing in space, a better understanding of the fibroblasts’ reaction to altered gravity levels is needed. In this paper, we describe experiments that were carried out at the Large Diameter Centrifuge located in ESA-ESTEC as part of the ESA Academy 2021 Spin Your Thesis! Campaign. We exposed dermal fibroblasts to a set of altered gravity levels, including transitions between simulated microgravity and hypergravity. The addition of the stress hormone cortisol to the cell culture medium was done to account for possible interaction effects of gravity and cortisol exposure. Results show a main impact of cortisol on the secretion of pro-inflammatory cytokines as well as extracellular matrix proteins. Altered gravity mostly induced a delay in cellular migration and changes in mechanosensitive cell structures. Furthermore, 20 × g hypergravity transitions induced changes in nuclear morphology. These findings provide insights into the effect of gravity transitions on the fibroblasts’ function related to wound healing, which may be useful for the development of countermeasures

Robust radiotherapy planning

Motion and uncertainty in radiotherapy is traditionally handled via margins. The clinical target volume (CTV) is expanded to a larger planning target volume (PTV), which is irradiated to the prescribed dose. However, the PTV concept has several limitations, especially in proton therapy. Therefore, robust and probabilistic optimization methods have been developed that directly incorporate motion and uncertainty into treatment plan optimization for intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) and intensity modulated proton therapy (IMPT). Thereby, the explicit definition of a PTV becomes obsolete and treatment plan optimization is directly based on the CTV. Initial work focused on random and systematic setup errors in IMRT. Later, inter-fraction prostate motion and intra-fraction lung motion became a research focus. Over the past ten years, IMPT has emerged as a new application for robust planning methods. In proton therapy, range or setup errors may lead to dose degradation and misalignment of dose contributions from different beams - a problem that cannot generally be addressed by margins. Therefore, IMPT has led to the first implementations of robust planning methods in commercial planning systems, making these methods available for clinical use. This paper first summarizes the limitations of the PTV concept. Subsequently, robust optimization methods are introduced and their applications in IMRT and IMPT planning are reviewed