Eleven students and doctoral candidates of the University of Trento were selected to take part in the ESA Academy Experiments Programme: an initiative of the European Space Agency supporting space economy activities promoted by universities of Member States. This programme is carried out parallelly to the academic experience, so that students can learn to develop their ideas through an open dialogue with ESA professionals.
This is the only Italian project, among the seven applicants that successfully passed the last step of the ESA selection, having the objective of taking a powerful particle detector called Sparkle into orbit. The experiment is currently scheduled to be launched by 2025 aboard a Space Rider spacecraft that will gravitate at 400 km from Earth for approximately two months before coming back. “This is the first time that ESA has made this innovative spacecraft available for the Academy programme,” said Veronica Vilona, aerospace engineer and research manager of the Astro-Particle Physics group at the INFN Trento Institute for Fundamental Physics and Applications (Tifpa), as well as technical point of contact for the students involved. “Participating in person in the development of all phases of a space mission – from design to launch, to in-orbit measurements and even return to Earth – is an extraordinary opportunity for researchers. A unique experience. Usually, in fact, students in particular, only see a small part of large projects,” added Vilona.
Waiting for the mission to start, the University of Trento students will have the opportunity to work side by side with the ESA staff to implement their ideas and, once the spacecraft is back into orbit, they will study the data collected. “Students usually do not get to work with ESA engineers and to use its facilities. It is a good sign that the students from UniTrento are offered this opportunity. It is a recognition of the quality and competitiveness of the project presented by the team. For us, this also means that our University today attracts and trains the students who will be the space scientists of tomorrow,” concluded Roberto Iuppa, professor of the Department of Physics of UniTrento and physicist of the Tifpa Institute.
