Following the success of Rodrigo Laurinovičs, a student of Ventspils University of Applied Sciences’s study programme "Electronics Engineering", during his time at the European Space Agency, we wanted to learn more about Rodrigo's daily life and how he is fitting into the team. Last month, Rodrigo Laurinovičs received the International SpaceOps Award for Outstanding Achievement with the European Space Agency's (ESA) OPS-SAT team. In this interview, David Evans, Head of the OPS-SAT laboratory, talks about Rodrigo's daily life and his determination to succeed with ESA.

What is Rodrigo’s position in ESA?

Rodrigo works in our team to acquire knowledge and experience to add value to his company when he returns. He is the first person at ESOC to use such a mechanism, so everything was new to him and to us at the beginning! He will stay with us for at least one year and hopefully two.

What is he like as a part of your team?

He is a very likeable character and works incredibly hard. One of his best qualities (which played a significant role in his recruitment) is his ability to have a go at anything and give it everything. Even if he had little experience of the operational environment to begin with, he quickly became indispensable to the team gaining very deep and specialised knowledge in some difficult areas. At the same time, he is willing to share and spread that knowledge among the other team members and in fact the OPS-SAT experimenters. The team is very close knit and he has integrated without problems.

How do you see his accomplished work?

He has evolved into a very accomplished operations engineer in his time with us. Working on a real spacecraft implementing cutting edge technologies such as in-orbit FPGA reprogramming is risky work. To be successful you need a mixture of bravery and caution in equal measure and Rodrigo certainly has that. I have been able to leave him in charge to perform recovery actions or complicated experiments on the live satellite without reserve, something that not everyone attains. As an example, we recently experienced a major anomaly on the file system of the experimental processor. In a typical style, Rodrigo assumed responsibility for testing and implementing the technically complex solution we needed to workaround the problem. This was not easy and required many hours of testing, many ending with dead-ends, until he finally came up with an operationally practical solution. I will always be grateful for that.   

How will he benefit from this type of experience in the future?

His main specialisation is reprogramming the FPGA fabric in orbit. OPS-SAT has proved this to be an extremely powerful tool for spacecraft operators. It is at the core of OPS-SAT innovation as we are the first ESA spacecraft to fly and experiment with such a unit. We have learnt that the technology is potent but needs to be handled carefully as you are actually reconfiguring the hardware of the processor in orbit. I am convinced that once this technology is mastered then it will cause a similar revolution as the rise of on-board software did in my career. The skills that Rodrigo has already obtained on OPS-SAT are going to make him very valuable and sought after in the near future.