Registration for the European Space Agency (ESA)'s astronaut selection may now be closed, but another opportunity to make it into microgravity has just popped up for young scientists.
ESA's education office has launched a new programme called "Fly Your Thesis! – An Astronaut Experience" in which European university students may take part in a competition and carry out their experiments in microgravity as the winning prize.
The students' mission is to design an experiment they'd like to perform up in the sky as part of their Masters or Ph.D. research project. They must first register as a team with an outline research proposal. Up to 20 teams will then be selected by the end of September 2008 to prepare a more detailed proposal with the help of a mentor provided by ESA. Those teams will go to ESA’s European Space Technology and Research Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands to present their project to a jury.
Up to 4 teams will be selected in January 2009 to take part in ESA's Autumn 2009 Microgravity Research Campaign in Bordeaux, France. Students will fly three times aboard an Airbus A300 Zero-G aircraft, experiencing each time 30 parabolic flights and about 10 minutes of microgravity.
All along, students will be given scientific support by the ESA Education Office, ESA microgravity experts, and members of the European Low Gravity Research Association. ESA will also pay students' travel and accommodation expenses and cover part of the experiments.
To be eligible you must be a citizen from one of the ESA member and cooperating states, and be a full-time student in one of those countries. You also must be under 28, and although these do not figure in the eligibility requirements, there are some medical requirements for parabolic flights you should be aware of. Teams may be 2-4 students, and a professor or supervisor must take the responsibility for the experiments.
Deadline for registration: 31 August 2008. More information on the competition the can be found on the ESA Web site.
