Day 10 in Alpbach, the final day of the Summer School, was all about the final presentations. The order of them was randomly chosen by the judges, with my Orange team being picked to go first. We were a bit nervous, with so much work over the past nine days having gone into what we were about to present. Our presentation was set to last an hour, with 30 minutes then following for questions from the judges.

Several of the team were presenting and I spoke about our team’s slides about some of our spacecraft’s requirements and systems. These included the on-board computer (OBC), and power and telemetry, tracking and commanding (TTC) systems.

The presentation really flew by and soon our hour was up and we had finished on time, with the only hiccup being a couple of non-functional animations. Then it was time for the judges, including Head of the Jury Roger Bonnet, to find out through their questions whether we really understood what our mission was about and how it would work.

All the questions from the judges were fair, but they were challenging too. Asked how we would get young people involved in the mission, I said we could offer opportunities such as internships and work experience to students, who may have innovative ideas that could complement the great experience of older team members.

Not long after, the judges were happy and our questions complete, with it being time for a break before the next presentation. My whole Orange Team was relieved to have made it successfully through the presentation and people from other teams congratulated us on a good presentation.

The presentations continue

After the break, Team Red were the second to present, with their Origin of Water and Life (OWL) mission. Their mission was to target Comet 45P/Honda–Mrkos–Pajdušáková to study its composition and properties to determine the role of comets in the delivery of water and organic compounds to Earth.

Team Red’s mission was the only one of the four to be targeting a comet, so it was really interesting to hear about this mysterious type of body and find out what science we could glean from them.

After lunch, the third presentation came from Team Blue, with their Calathus mission to the asteroid Ceres. The team presented a really interesting mission to this mysterious body, which has been explored by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft since 2015. The real highlight of the presentation though was the truly excellent presenting by Lucy Kissick, who’s studying for a PhD in Martian geology at the University of Oxford. Her passion for the subject was very clear, her voice well modulated and her sentences smooth. She obviously knew exactly what she was saying and really enthused the audience. Lucy’s part of Team Blue’s presentation was probably the best public speaking I’ve ever seen.

What was more unusual with Team Blue was the method they had settled upon for their outreach (for which Lucy made an excellent example video). The team decided they would make chocolate treats that would represent the various layers on Ceres’ inner structure. They even made some in advance of the final presentation and gave samples to the judges, something which the other teams jokingly considered bribery.

Overall though, Team Blue’s presentation was excellent and gave a very interesting and compelling science case for their mission to Ceres. There was a break after the presentation, during which we congratulated the team for their hard work.

Last to present were Team Green, with their CARINA mission to asteroid 2002 AT4. The questions they sought to answer included the relationship between comets and asteroids and the origins of water and life on Earth, so it promised to be just as interesting a mission as the others.

Team Green described how their mission would use a bristle and harpoon mechanisms to collect samples from 2002 AT4, with the bristles collecting up to 300g of regolith and the harpoons collecting samples from a depth of up to 24cm. CARINA was certainly an interesting proposal.

After Team Green’s presentation, Head Tutor Peter Falkner gave some closing remarks, describing how all the presentations and reports had been of a high quality and how all the teams had worked extremely hard to meet the deadlines throughout the summer school. We then had a couple of hours to relax while the Jury met to decide the winners. I returned to my guest house for some well-deserved rest, then at 19:30 we all assembled at the Alpbach Congress Center for the farewell dinner.

As we waited outside the Congress Center for the dinner to start, we had some great views along the valley. We also knew it would be the last time the whole cohort would be together, so we presented our Tutors with some small gifts and got lots of pictures of our groups. Then, as the sun was setting below the steep Austrian mountains, we headed inside and took our seats.

The judges presented several awards. The first award went to my Team Orange, for the best written report. We were really pleased to receive the award and I was particularly happy that my work to proofread and tidy up the report before its submission was recognised.

Team Blue were given the award for the best technical case due to their very detailed description of their mission’s systems. They also won the award for best presentation – with Lucy’s amazing performance this was practically a given and it was great to see the team lifting her above them to recognise her contribution themselves.

Team Green won the award for the best science case. They earned this by describing in depth each of their scientific instruments and what data they would collect. Peter Falkner also award Team Green the head tutor award for excellent work overall.

Finally, Team Red won the award for the most competitive mission, with this award being given to the team whose mission has been judged to provide the best value for money.

Celebrations and Farewells

After the award ceremony, it was time for some well-earned relaxation. The whole cohort walked into the village, where we enjoyed some celebratory drinks as we said goodbye to those who’d be getting flights early the next morning.

After a little while, it was time for us to head to bed. It had been a very long day of presentations, awards and goodbyes. It had also been the final day of the 2018 Alpbach Summer School. The whole time had gone by in a whirlwind, but was a truly amazing experience.

Day 9 of the Alpbach Summer School was extremely busy, with the whole team in the final push to finish our report and presentation before the hard deadline at midnight. The day started with us all meeting at the school house at 9:30am after a late night last night addressing the feedback on our Final Design Review.

We all quickly assembled in our team classroom and got straight down to work, picking up where we’d left off last night. We still had lots of areas of the presentation to polish before showing the final version to the whole Summer School cohort tomorrow. The work was almost non-stop, with us taking shifts for lunch to always have a good number of us in the team room.

We put some finishing touches on our sample return canister design to prevent the sample sublimating during the return trip.

We kept working on the presentation and took some time in the afternoon to rehearse it in full in the sports hall that has been used as a lecture theatre during the summer school. This was very useful and revealed a few little areas we needed to polish up and memorise, but gave everyone who’d be speaking (including me) a chance to really learn our slides and where they fit in the presentation.

As the day moved on, we edged ever closer to the midnight deadline. As well as the final presentation, we also had to produce a written report in the style of a paper, which would be assessed alongside the presentation. We used the online collaboration tool Overleaf to write our report in the academic document preparation system LaTeX. Unlike the presentation, which we could base on the PDR and FDR from previous days, the report had to be written from scratch, meaning a good amount of our time was spent on this, and virtually all of it as we moved into the evening.

Team Orange hard at work as our midnight deadline looms…

Work became increasingly frantic as we approached midnight and we made the decision that as I was the only one on the team with English as my first language, I should be the one to proofread the report. With some much work having gone into it and so little time left, the pressure was on, but one paragraph at a time I speedily read through the report and edited it to make the text flow better.

We got a few last little bits tweaked in the report, quickly added it and the presentation to a memory stick and, at 23:54, we were ready. We dashed upstairs to the submission room and received a round of applause from the Summer School tutors as we handed over the memory stick.

Team Orange celebrate our successful presentation and report submission with Head Tutor Peter Falkner. © 2018 MA Jakob / Summer School Alpbach FFG/ESA

The whole team could now relax for the first time in several days. We jubilantly headed back to our classroom and cracked open some drinks to celebrate the passing of the deadline and our successful report and presentation submission. After all the teams had submitted our presentations and reports, we walked up the hill to the rest of the village and found a bar for some celebratory drinks, and spent a few hours celebrating all our hard work.

Yesterday was a long, tiring day, but also extremely productive, with all the teams working really hard to finish their reports and presentations before the deadline at midnight. But in the morning, the final presentations will begin…

Today has been a very busy day in Alpbach, with lots of work to prepare for the afternoon’s Final Design Review (FDR).

During yesterday’s Preliminary Design Review (PDR), we received many useful pieces of feedback from the reviewers on how we could strengthen our science case and the technical side of our mission to return a sample from a D-type asteroid. The team was working on aspects such as clarifying the flowdown of science requirements to engineering, and working out the finer details of the spacecraft subsystems.

Our mission also took on its final name: DESIRE, the D-Type Explorer for Subsurface Interior sample REturn.

Impression of the DESIRE lander on asteroid 2002 AT4

I spent the working on the Computer Aided Design (CAD) models of the orbiter and lander, with our lander taking on a look rather similar to ESA’s Philae. Similarly to the comet lander, it uses a drill at the back of the spacecraft, the back of which is clamped against the orbiter for the transfer to our target asteroid. The subject of our mission will be the asteroid 2002 AT4, a near Earth D-type asteroid orbiting between 1.03 and 2.71 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun.

One of the key phases of the mission is the recovery of the sample canister from the lander. Our recovery architecture involves the canister being fired up from the lander by a spring or moving platform, towards the orbiter, which will use its Attitude and Orbital Control System (AOCS) to hover overhead. Of course once the canister is in range of the lander, it has to be captured somehow. For this we’ve used a system developed by two of the Summer School lecturers, Michelle Lavagna and Peter Falkner, which has already undergone testing in the weightlessness of a parabolic flight. This gives it a Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of 6 out of 9, with the TRL being a key metric in space mission design and 6 generally accepted as the minimum for a part or system to be chosen for a mission.

FDR Results

Eventually, the time came for the FDR. The reviewers gathered again in our team room and we began our presentation, explaining our mission in more detail than yesterday’s PDR. The presentation went reasonably well. Some errors had not quite been brushed out from the PDR, but overall it was certainly a big improvement over the former review.

The judges’ questions were again thorough, and they raised several good points for us to address before the final presentation tomorrow. Overall though, we felt much happier than we had 24 hours ago – it felt like our mission was really coming together. On Thursday, we face our biggest presentation, in front of the whole Summer School cohort, but we’re looking forward to doing lots more work before then and making a strong case for our mission to a D-type asteroid.

Today in Alpbach, we had the final lectures of the Summer School. While it was great to be able to crack on with lots more work before our afternoon Preliminary Design Review (PDR), it was also somewhat sad to think that we wouldn’t have any more leading experts from across Europe telling us all about their fields. Of course many of the tutors will remain on hand for the rest of the Summer School, but we now have the feeling that we’re more on our own, with no more lectures to fill us with useful knowledge.

These final lectures focussed on what we can learn from Earth-based observations; sample curation, including handling, analysis and storage; and lessons learned from actual small body missions such as Philae and MASCOT. The lecture on sample curation was particularly interesting, as it opened our eyes to a whole large aspect of the mission that many of us had not previously considered. We realised how involved the curation process is and the extreme level of care that will have to be taken with the priceless asteroid samples from our mission.

Artist’s impression of Philae landing on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko

Although we intended to have lunch after the final lecture, this ended up slipping us by as we were so focussed on preparing for the PDR. Although we had had the science review on day 4, this felt like the first major milestone in the development of our mission. We knew that the judges wouldn’t hold back with their (constructive) criticism, so it was important to do as good a job as we could in the final few hours before the review at 16:30.

In the rush to do as much as we could, the time flew by, and soon the deadline was upon us. The tutors gathered in our team room and we began our presentation of our mission, called SPARTA (SamPle And ReTurn Alpbach). Firstly we set out some of the overall questions that we aim to answer, such as how the early solar system evolved and what its chemical composition and spatial distribution were like.

Next we described the selection criteria for our target, such as being in an orbit similar to that of the Earth to minimise the delta-v needed for the orbital transfer. We described what D-type asteroids are and then announced our chosen target body: the asteroid 1993 HA, a 300-600 m asteroid approximately 1.278 AU from the Sun.

We then dove more deeply into each of our science requirements and described the instruments required on the orbiter and lander to fulfil each of these, before we moved onto wider mission analysis topics. These included outlining each of the mission phases, such as asteroid rendezvous, or reentry back at Earth.

Cutaway render of our lander showing the crushable structure, drill, sample return canister and instruments

Our PDR then showed the tutors the details of the different mission phases, with particular attention paid to the landing, sampling and sample canister return processes as these would be most technically challenging. Reentry was also described in detail, with plots from an optimisation procedure and of flight path angle over time shown among others.

While our PDR presented a fair bit of detail, it became clear from the tutors’ questions that we still had to clarify the requirements flow across our mission. The science questions needed to be solidified and we had to show how this generated particular science goals,  such as studying D-type asteroids rather than another body type. From these goals, science requirements, such as the depth and mass of sample that would be required, can be derived. These need more detail in our case, particularly as they form the basis of the engineering requirements around which the engineering team build the rest of the mission.

Tomorrow is our mission’s Final Design Review (FDR), so we will be working hard to ensure that all the issues with our science and technical cases are ironed out before then. This will be the last industry-style review of our mission before the final presentation to the rest of the Summer School cohort on Thursday.

All my tweets about the Summer School can be found under #AlpbachSummerSchool and my blog posts about it are all in the Alpbach category.

On this, the Sunday of the Alpbach Summer School, we have been back into the swing of things to prepare for our Preliminary Design Review (PDR) on Monday. Arriving at the School House at 9:30, we found the surrounding hills still covered in cloud. The team spent the day continuing the systems engineering work required for the PDR, then had a dry run review in the afternoon with six tutors in attendance.

From this review, we received lots of useful feedback and had the opportunity to ask questions about aspects such as our landing system and the finer details of our science case. This pre-PDR review ended up taking three hours, but it was certainly worth it for the amount it taught us and for how much more prepared we felt for the PDR. Tomorrow, we’ll face the real PDR, where the tutors will have their first proper look at our mission as it comes together.

As always, you can find all my Alpbach Summer School posts under the Alpbach category on my blog and tagged with #AlpbachSummerSchool on Twitter.

The Friday of the Alpbach Summer School began with a lecture on mission analysis tools by Marcus Hallman, the Chief Mission Analyst at the DLR. This gave a good insight into different trajectories to get to small bodies around the solar system.

It was followed by a sampling technology lecture by Michele Lavagna from the Politecnico di Milano. This focussed on the different ways that the teams’ missions could retrieve their samples from their targets, and, like many of the other lectures, used the Japanese Hayabusa mission as a case study.

Hayabusa2 sampling asteroid Ryugu © JAXA / Akihiro Ikeshita

The final lecture of the day, before lunch, came from Andrew Ball from ESA, on system engineering and technology. This told us all about the various systems of a spacecraft and how the design process ties these all together. It also emphasised the critical role of a systems engineer in maintaining an overview of all the systems and making sure they can all operate together.

After lunch, it was time to dive back into the workshop, where we were sharply focussed on preparing for the mission objectives and observations requirements review at 16:30. This, the first review of the summer school, checked that we had a good science case for our mission and knew what requirements our instruments had so we could start designing the rest of the spacecraft around them.

Our review revealed several holes in our science case that needed addressing regarding the deuterium/hydrogen or D/H ratio that we would investigate at the asteroid as well as our target’s suspiciously high albedo (reflectivity to light) that led one of the experts to suspect that it wasn’t a D-type asteroid at all. As soon as dinner was over, we returned to the School House to crack on with fixing these problems, as the whole mission depended on it.

Day 3 of the Alpbach Summer School began with a lecture on Earth re-entry by an expert from the Royal Observatory of Belgium. Then came lectures on sample information versus context from the surroundings, and on challenges for sample return such as cometary activity.

After lunch, we dove straight back into the workshops, where we split off into our teams to continue our mission design work. For my team, the main question was what type of small body we would visit. We had already narrowed it down to either a Main Belt Comet (MBC) or D-type asteroid, but the team had become divided into two groups, each rooting for one of the body types. Lots of heated discussion ensued, with us coming to the conclusion that both groups could make a strong science case, but both had unanswered questions that would make the engineering design to come more challenging.

A fragment of the Tagish Lake meteorite. Credit: Michael Holly, Creative Services, University of Alberta

Finally, we made our decision: we will be sending our mission to a Near Earth D-type asteroid. Little is known about these bodies, although it is strongly suspected from its chemical signature that the large Tagish Lake meteorite that was found in British Columbia in 2000 came from a D-type. I stayed up until 1:15am to help the team where I could, but further refinement of the science case will be needed over the coming days. This will let us define our particular science goals and work out which instruments we will need to take with us on our long journey into the blackness.

More updates on the rest of the Alpbach Summer School will be coming soon and can all be found under the events category on my blog.

The first Wednesday of the Alpbach Summer School has included a selection of lectures from ESA, DLR and the Universities of Vienna and Leicester. Subjects included what we can learn from meteorites, mission design and analysis, why we need to bring samples back to Earth and navigation before and during landings on small bodies.

ESA Director General Jan Wörner presents at Alpbach

One of the big highlights of the day was a motivational talk before lunch from Jan Wörner, the current Director General of ESA. He spoke about ESA’s various divisions, future interactions between ESA and commercial entities and lunar exploration. The most inspiring part of his speech though was when he reinforced that my generation will make up the next batch of space leaders, with those at the Alpbach Summer School being particularly strong candidates.

The day’s lectures were very interesting and the wide range of topics gave us plenty to think about before we split into our teams at 17:00 to continue work on defining the science cases for our missions. A strong science case is fundamental to a mission, as it defines not only the target body, but also the types and resolutions of all the measurements to be taken there. Therefore it is key to define the science goals and requirements as quickly and in as much depth as possible so that these can then be translated into system requirements. Work on this will continue tomorrow after lectures on re-entry, information from samples, and the challenges of sample return.

Today has been my first day of work at the Alpbach Summer School. The day started with registration at 8am, followed at 9am by open speeches from the Summer School Director, Michaela Gitsch, and other staff involved in the running of the Summer School.

At 10am, a coffee break gave us our first proper opportunity to meet the other students who we’d be spending the next 10 days with. Despite the huge range of nationalities, with 17 countries represented by the 62 students, I quickly found two of the British contingent, and we talked about their backgrounds in meteoritics and the differences with my engineering experience. It was particularly interesting to hear about the experiences of one of the Brits who works with the meteorite collection of London’s Natural History Museum.

After the coffee break, we dived into our first lectures of the Summer School, starting with Alessandro Morbidelli from the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur telling us what small bodies are and why they’re important. Our missions will be designed to collect a sample from a small solar system body, so it was vital to have good knowledge of the bodies we’d be targeting. Next came Alan Fitzsimmons from the Astrophysics Research Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, telling us about the physical properties of small bodies.

For an engineer, these first two lectures were certainly a dive into the deep end of solar system science, with many terms and classifications to learn in a short period of time. Energy was also a challenge though: the really early start yesterday meant I was struggling to stay awake in some of the lectures.

Lunch was another opportunity to meet the rest of the cohort, after which we had our final lecture of the day from Christian Gritzner of DLR on types of mission for sample return. During this talk, I had the very cool chance to see and hold a piece of the asteroid Vesta – it was amazing to think that the lump of rock had come from an asteroid many millions of miles away.

After the afternoon coffee break, it was time to split into our teams, with whom we’d be designing our sample return missions over the next 10 days. It was great to finally know who we’d be working with and to discover the team’s expertise. Our mix of scientists and engineers of a range of nationalities gave us a very diverse team, with each member able to contribute something new.

After initial greetings, we began work on defining the science case for our mission. The overall theme of the summer school, sample return from small solar system bodies, had to be broken down to work out our overarching science goals and the particular questions and measurements that this would lead to. We spent a few hours reading papers and came up with three core themes: the origin of the solar system, the origin and transport of water and the origin of life. We spent some time trying to expand these further to work out which bodies would make good targets to address these themes, but work will continue tomorrow on developing our case before the mission objectives and observations requirements review on Friday.

In the middle of the science work, directly after dinner, we also had a very interesting talk by Jean-Jacques Dordain, the former Director General of the European Space Agency. He spoke about significant decisions he had to make during his time as DG, such as delaying the launch of Rosetta, current efforts in Luxembourg to develop asteroid mining, and how today’s students (and particularly those at Alpbach) will be the driving force behind the future European and global space industries. It was great to have strong vocal support from such a well-known and successful figure from the industry and I’m grateful to the Alpbach organisers for arranging such a fantastic lineup of speakers, with more to come tomorrow…

As always I’ll be tweeting throughout the Summer School with the hashtag #AlpbachSummerSchool and will be posting all of my Alpbach blog posts in the events category, so make sure to follow my progress there.

On Monday morning, I’ll be jetting off to Austria for the 2018 Alpbach Summer School, high in the Alps. For the past few days I’ve been making my final preparations, putting clothes together and checking into flights to make the whole trip as smooth as possible.

The summer school will involve 64 European students designing space missions over the course of 10 days, under the theme of sample return from small solar system bodies. We’ll be split into four teams and will receive talks from experts from across the industry on how to design the various science and engineering aspects of our missions.

As well as being a great opportunity to work on a detailed technical project, it’ll also be a good opportunity to meet like-minded students from across Europe, with each providing their own perspectives on the industry and the technical challenges that will face us.

I’m really looking forward to the summer school and will try to post updates on my blog throughout the trip. I’ll also be tweeting throughout the event, so make sure to follow me there for all the latest updates.