Space Systems Research Intern – Advanced Concepts

European Space Agency - ESA; Noordwijk; On-site; EUR 12,000 - 19,000; Full time

Job summary

European Space Agency (ESA) in Noordwijk invites university interns to join the Technology Directorate, Advanced Concepts Team. You will work on KTSP autodiscovery, physics-informed guidance networks, and deployment heuristics, contributing to cutting-edge spaceflight concept studies.

The internship emphasizes modular heuristic development, data-driven evaluation, and collaboration with a multidisciplinary team.

Qualifications

• Must be a university student enrolled for the duration of the internship.
• Strong interest in space systems and algorithmic research.
• Proficiency in English (working language of the Agency is English/French).

Responsibilities

• Survey KTSP and related trajectory optimisation problems and develop large KTSP instances.
• Develop modular representations of heuristic components (ACO rules, beam-search policies, MCTS rollout strategies).
• Implement an agentic framework that generates, evaluates, selects, and refines heuristic variants.
• Benchmark KTSP/heuristics on instance sets for solution quality, runtime, robustness and scalability.

Skills

Research oriented

Team collaboration

Programming basics

Communication skills

Education

University student (Master level preferred)

Job description

European Space Agency (ESA) in Noordwijk invites university interns to join the Technology Directorate, Advanced Concepts Team. You will work on KTSP autodiscovery, physics-informed guidance networks, and deployment heuristics, contributing to cutting-edge spaceflight concept studies.

The internship emphasizes modular heuristic development, data-driven evaluation, and collaboration with a multidisciplinary team.