Almost half of the Aerospace MEng Project Group - three of seven - have been accepted into the European Space Agency's (ESA) CubeSat Concurrent Engineering Workshop.

The four-day workshop takes place between 20th and 23rd February at the ESA Academy’s Training and Learning Facility in ESEC-Galaxia, Belgium, and just 30 students from countries across the world including throughout Europe and Canada, have been selected to take part.

This workshop will expose students to real-life concurrent engineering approach practices while designing a CubeSat mission. A CubeSat is a miniature satellite, and concurrent engineering is a method of designing and developing products for the space sector in which all subsystems are designed simultaneously. Throughout the workshop, students will work in teams to apply Concurrent Engineering to CubeSat design, while also participating in lectures and visiting the CubeSat Support Facility.

Finally, each team will get the opportunity to present the CubeSat project that they developed in the workshop to the other students and the experts.

The successful students, Hamza Maljee, Emil Sieciechowicz and Kevin Zyka will be using the time and funding to develop their project APO-PHISHING, which aims to design, build and test a CubeSat for Asteroid Deflection.

"It is expected that the project would lead to new ways of encapsulating a LASER beam generating system into a relatively small CUBESAT while meeting the low energy and weight requirements of such an orbiting satellite." Said Dr Ranjan Vepa, Reader in Aerospace Engineering.