Three out of seven members of the Aerospace Engineering MEng Project Group have been accepted to participate in the European Space Agency's (ESA) prestigious CubeSat Concurrent Engineering Workshop.

The four-day workshop will take place from February 20th to 23rd at the ESA Academy’s Training and Learning Facility in ESEC-Galaxia, Belgium. Only 30 students from countries across Europe, Canada, and beyond were selected to attend.

During the workshop, students will gain hands-on experience with the concurrent engineering approach used in real-world space missions, focusing on the design of CubeSat missions. A CubeSat is a type of miniature satellite, and concurrent engineering is a process in which all subsystems are designed simultaneously, streamlining development and increasing efficiency. Participants will collaborate in teams to apply this method to CubeSat design, attend expert-led lectures, and visit the CubeSat Support Facility.

At the conclusion of the workshop, each team will have the opportunity to present their CubeSat project to fellow students and industry experts.

The three selected Queen Mary students — Hamza Maljee, Emil Sieciechowicz, and Kevin Zyka — will be using the experience to further develop their project, APO-PHISHING, which aims to design, build, and test a CubeSat for asteroid deflection.

“This project could pave the way for new techniques in encapsulating a laser beam generation system into a relatively small CubeSat while adhering to the strict energy and weight requirements of an orbiting satellite,” said Dr Ranjan Vepa, Reader in Aerospace Engineering.