In early April, 116 university students gathered across Europe to participate in the European Space Agency Academy’s Concurrent Engineering Challenge 2025. Connecting three major European institutions, Politecnico di Milano (Italy), Cranfield University (UK) and the University of Aveiro (Portugal), alongside ESA’s own educational centre in Belgium, the event pushed students to design an ambitious interplanetary mission in a truly collaborative environment.
The mission the students were set was to enhance humanity’s understanding of the chemical composition of the Solar System and the origins of life by studying comets. Inspired by the legacy of ESA’s Rosetta mission and leveraging insights from Comet Interceptor and OSIRIS-REx, the challenge was to design a spacecraft capable of collecting and returning comet samples to Earth.
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Over the course of a week, students formed teams representing spacecraft subsystems such as propulsion, power, thermal, AOCS, payload and more. Each university developed its own mission concept, while also maintaining continuous communication and collaboration across the sites to share knowledge, ensure cross-team alignment and learn from each other, exactly as ESA engineers do in real missions.
Importantly, all facilities remained connected throughout the entire day, creating an immersive, collaborative environment. At the end of each day, a collective wrap-up session was held to discuss improvements, share lessons learned and present the results achieved by each team, reinforcing the iterative and collaborative nature of the challenge.
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The challenge simulated a real-life concurrent engineering process, as conducted in ESA’s Concurrent Design Facility, with all teams progressing from preliminary concept to feasibility study, considering mission objectives, design constraints and system-level trade-offs. Key objectives included studying the elemental composition of comets; collecting and returning comet samples to Earth; and contributing to future commercial or planetary defence missions, potentially enabling in-situ fuel production.
During the final day, teams presented their mission concepts in front of ESA engineers and their university coordinators, showcasing consolidated science objectives, technical requirements, design solutions and even preliminary CAD models and cost estimates.
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Besides technical excellence, the event focused on teamwork and communication. Students, system engineers and university coordinators worked hand-in-hand across countries, experiencing first-hand the international collaboration that defines ESA’s engineering approach.
‘It’s been an incredible experience, one that will be very hard to repeat. Everyone was incredibly smart and kind, and worked really hard to make this mission feasible,’ said one student from the University of Aveiro. ‘The mission was both demanding and fascinating, and I now realise that designing a space mission is even more complex and exciting than I imagined. I enjoyed working with different subsystems to integrate our work and understand how the whole system comes together.’
More information about future ESA Academy training opportunities can be found here.