Call for Proposals for Sounding Rocket and Balloon Flights

A BEXUS balloon is inflated prior to flight

10 September 2008
The ESA Education Office has today issued a call for proposals for student experiments to be flown on two REXUS sounding rockets and two BEXUS stratospheric balloons.
 
Selected student teams will have the opportunity to design and build an experiment suitable for a flight on the BEXUS 8 and 9 balloons that will be launched in October 2009, or the REXUS 7 and 8 sounding rockets, to be launched in March 2010. All flights will take place from Kiruna in Northern Sweden. 

Each flight will carry a payload consisting solely of student experiments. Half the payload is available to German students through a DLR Announcement of Opportunity and the other half is made available to students from all other ESA Member States and Co-operating States* by the Swedish National Space Board (SNSB) through a collaboration with ESA. 

	A REXUS rocket is launched from Esrange in Kiruna, Sweden

Applications and Selection
 
The deadline for applications is 17 November 2008. More information can be found athttp://www.rexusbexus.net and applications should be submitted at http://joinspace.org. The flight opportunity is open to students aged between 18 and 28 at the time of the application deadline. Applicants must be enrolled as a full-time undergraduate or PhD student in a university located in an ESA Member State or Co-operating State*. They must also be studying or researching a subject in a relevant field of science or engineering. (N.B. German students should apply to the parallel DLR call for proposals.) 

The best 12-15 team proposals will be shortlisted and announced on19 December 2008. The shortlisted teams will then be invited to a workshop at ESTEC during the first week of February 2009 to present their proposals to experts from ESA and Esrange. The final selection will be made by the team of experts, immediately after the workshop. 

The selected teams will be invited to a training week in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany at the end of March 2009. A preliminary design review of each experiment will be carried out during this week by experts from Esrange. Students will be expected to build their experiments during the summer of 2009 (in the case of BEXUS) and up to the end of 2009 (in the case of REXUS). 

ESA will sponsor up to four team members from each team to attend the following:

• the selection workshop at ESTEC;
• the training week in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany;
• the flight campaign.

All costs related to the rockets, balloons and launches are covered under the bilateral Agency Agreement between SNSB and DLR regarding the REXUS and BEXUS programmes. Esrange experts will provide technical support in the integration and testing phase, as well as providing campaign management and operations. Students will be responsible for funding the development of the experiments and their shipment to Esrange, in collaboration with their universities or other sponsors. 

SOURCE: ESA