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A student from VUAS demonstrates his skills at the European Space Agency
January 20, 2023
Rodrigo Laurinovičs, a student of Ventspils University of Applied Sciences bachelor's degree programme "Electronics Engineering", has received international recognition and has been awarded an internship at the European Space Agency (ESA), whose mission is to build and develop European space capabilities and ensure that investments in the space sector benefit European citizens and industry. Rodrigo is the first Latvian undergraduate student to have been awarded such an internship.
Rodrigo's work experience at ESA, Germany started on 1 March 2022, which is a relatively long period of time, so we decided to find out how Rodrigo is getting on, what his vision of the experience and his job responsibilities are.
How are you doing at ESA?
I am now well integrated into the team. I am learning a variety of concepts in satellite operations. I am more responsible for the system behaviour of our experiment platform (an FPGA with a built-in microcontroller on top of a Linux operating system, responsible for the performance of the proposed experiments).
What are your job responsibilities?
The main job responsibilities are to keep the satellite alive at a non-standard approach, where experiments have the possibility to modify the physical structure of the system to optimize it for a given experiment. Of course, like the whole team, I am involved in active problem solving. There is no shortage of work, i.e. the interest of the work does not disappear either, because there are always unique tasks that are not interconnected. I've also realised the importance of documentation.
What were the motivating factors that helped you get into ESA?
I certainly didn't expect to be seconded to ESA as a Mission Control Engineer in my 3rd year. I wouldn't really say that I had a motivating factor that pushed me forward, but rather a liking for electronics that got noticed. This opportunity was offered to me, for which I am eternally grateful, as well as to all those who supported me over the years, both in academia and in my personal life.
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