For its Summer of Code open source development traineeships, the European Space Agency (ESA) is looking for sponsors to increase the number of students and projects and to help with promotion. “We would like the major firms in the space industry to participate”, says Maxime Perrotin, coordinating the Summer of Code for ESA.
Perrotin and his colleagues hope to attract more attention to their Summer of Code In Space (SOCIS).
Organised for the fifth year, the European Space Agency is again offering stipends for students to work on 23 space-related open source projects. Students can register as candidates until the end of this month. Students that are accepted will be paired with their mentor or mentors and over the summer months work with them to develop software. “It gives these students real-world experience to software development practices”, says Perrotin, a software engineer at ESA.
Students receive a first stipend of EUR 1000 at the start of the coding period. If the project is completed successfully after three months of work, the students receive an additional EUR 3000. Software coding usually starts in June.
Like in the past years, Perrotin is bracing for many last-minute registrations: “Again, only a handful have registered so far.”
Impact hazard
This year the space agency has several new projects that students can work on. In total 23 projects have registered with ESA, more or less the same as the previous two years.
One of this year’s new projects is AerospaceResearch.net, where students will be working on the development of models that predict comet and cosmic dust spacecraft impact hazards. And once more on the list of projects is RTEMS, the real-time operating system widely used by the space agency.