Two Maltese students with full sponsorship from Xjenza Malta, have put Malta on the map at this year’s European Space Agency Summer School Alpbach, with both earning awards for ambitious space mission concepts developed alongside young professionals from across Europe.Karl Caruana and Liliana Francalanza represented Malta at the 10-day residential programme in Austria, held between 14th and 23rd July and organised by the European Space Agency and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency.The pair were among just 61 participants selected from a competitive pool of applicants across ESA member and cooperating states, joining an international cohort of engineers, astrophysicists, astrodynamicists, astrobiologists, astrogeoscientists and materials scientists.And this wasn’t exactly your average summer school.The first five days saw participants attend expert-led lectures covering everything from stellar and solar activity to planetary magnetospheres and the systems-engineering challenges involved in developing real space missions.From there, the students were split into teams and tasked with putting that knowledge into practice, spending their evenings and the remainder of the programme developing their own mission proposals through intensive workshops and tutor reviews.Liliana’s Team Set Their Sights On UranusFrancalanza formed part of the team behind UMEO, an ambitious mission concept that would send a spacecraft to Uranus to better understand the planet’s unusual magnetosphere.Uranus has only ever been visited once, during Voyager 2’s 1986 flyby. However, that encounter was later found to have coincided with a rare solar wind event affecting fewer than 5% of observations, raising questions about how representative some of its findings actually were.UMEO would focus on areas including the planet’s magnetosphere, radiation belts, atmospheric loss, aurorae and magnetic reconnection.Despite the considerable challenges involved in sending scientific instruments to such a distant planet, Francalanza’s team demonstrated through engineering trade-offs and trajectory planning that their concept was both technically feasible and scientifically valuable.Their efforts earned them the Most Ambitious Feasible Mission Award.Karl’s Team Looked Towards JupiterCaruana, meanwhile, worked on AEGIS, a dual-spacecraft mission concept targeting Jupiter.The proposed mission aims to understand how energy moves through Jupiter’s plasma environment, magnetosphere and upper atmosphere.Over the course of the programme, Caruana and his teammates produced a comprehensive technical proposal covering literature reviews, instrument studies, orbital calculations, subsystem research and budgeting.Their approach ultimately earned the team the Best Concept of Operations Award during the programme’s closing ceremony.Currently pursuing a B.Sc. (Hons) in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Malta, Caruana said the experience gave him an opportunity to put his academic knowledge into practice while rapidly getting to grips with entirely new areas.“The experience pushed me to work at the intersection of science and engineering under real time pressure,” he said.“The most challenging aspects, such as quickly learning as much as I can about a new field to contribute meaningfully to the team, while managing such time pressure, proved to be the most rewarding parts of the programme.”He also credited the programme’s tutors with helping his team stay on track throughout the demanding design process.A Big Step For Malta’s Growing Space CommunityBoth Caruana and Francalanza attended the programme with full sponsorship from Xjenza Malta, support for which both students expressed their gratitude.With Malta’s presence in the space sector still relatively young and opportunities for local students in space science and engineering remaining limited, programmes like Summer School Alpbach provide a chance to gain hands-on experience while building connections with professionals from across Europe.And after returning home with two awards between them, the pair are hoping their experience will encourage more Maltese students interested in science, engineering and space to pursue similar opportunities in the future.Share this with someone who would be interested to know•