Intern in the Galileo and EGNOS Programme Department - Resilient Navigation Systems

As an Intern in the Galileo and EGNOS Programme Department - Resilient Navigation Systems, you will join the system security unit of the Galileo programme, which forms part of the Directorate of Resilience, Navigation and Connectivity.

• Location: ESTEC, Noordwijk, Netherlands
• Type of Appointment: Intern

Our team and mission

Our team is responsible for managing security activities throughout the programme, addressing both civil and governmental services to maintain robust end-to-end security standards.
We facilitate the definition of mission requirements and their subsequent evolution, integrating these into the system design while considering both performance and security. Furthermore, our unit assists in prototyping user segment receivers and system validation tools, enabling us to verify system capabilities and performance levels in advance and ensure compliance with mission, system and security specifications.

Field(s) of activity for the internship

Your internship will look at how future positioning, navigation and timing systems could become more resilient by making better use of the space segment and reducing their dependence on ground infrastructure.

Today, the generation and maintenance of high-accuracy navigation information rely heavily on ground infrastructure. Precise satellite orbits and clocks are determined and monitored from the ground, while information such as Earth orientation parameters is also generated through ground-based processing and observations. This creates a strong dependency between the space and ground segments and can represent a vulnerability to the resilience of the overall service. A disruption or loss of access to critical ground infrastructure could affect the ability to maintain accurate positioning, navigation and timing services.

At the same time, a number of new space-based capabilities are becoming available. Galileo provides a global navigation infrastructure, while new concepts involving low Earth orbit satellites, distributed navigation payloads and missions such as Genesis could provide additional measurements, precise timing and orbit determination capabilities. The question is whether these different capabilities could be brought together as a system of systems, with the space segment itself providing a much larger part of the information currently generated on the ground.

As an intern, you will have the following tasks:

• investigating what such an architecture could look like and, more importantly, what would be needed to make it work and improve the resilience of the overall system;
• looking firstly at the functions currently performed by the ground segment and assessing which of them could potentially be moved into space or supported by information exchanged between space-based assets, including orbit and clock determination, time and frequency synchronisation, Earth orientation information, navigation data generation and integrity monitoring;
• investigating then how different space assets could work together, including the measurements available from different types of satellites, the information that would need to be exchanged, possible inter-satellite links, distributed processing, the use of different orbital regimes, and how a common time and reference frame could be maintained across the system;
• identifying, as a key part of the internship, what is still missing to make the system sufficiently autonomous and resilient, including assessing gaps that may require new technologies, additional measurements or a different system architecture, and evaluating their impact on the ability of the system to continue providing positioning, navigation and timing services when parts of the ground infrastructure are unavailable or degraded;
• developing, as final objective, a possible roadmap towards a more autonomous and resilient space-based positioning, navigation and timing system, proposing how existing and future capabilities could complement each other, identifying the main technical and architectural challenges, and determining which developments would be needed to move from today's predominantly ground-supported architecture towards a system in which the space segment can increasingly determine, maintain and distribute its own navigation and timing information, even in the presence of disruptions to the ground segment.

Behavioural competencies

• Result Orientation
• Operational Efficiency
• Fostering Cooperation
• Relationship Management
• Continuous Improvement
• Forward Thinking

Education

You must be a university student, preferably in your final or second-to-last year of university course at Master's level. In addition, you must be able to prove that you will be enrolled at your university for the entire duration of the internship.

Additional requirements

The working languages of the Agency are English and French. A good knowledge of one of these is required. Knowledge of another ESA Member State language is an asset.

Applicants must be eligible to access information, technology, and hardware which is subject to European or US export control and sanctions regulations.

Nationality

Applications are only considered from nationals of one of the following States: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.