Visit to the Facilities

Visits to ESA facilities as well as Industrial facilities are an integral part of the School Curriculum allowing the students to “believe through seeing” real facilities that relate directly to the use of optics either at laboratory level or at spacecraft level. Visits can be physical on location or virtual from the lecture hall.

ESTEC Facilities

At the end of two days we will have the opportunity to:

- physical visit the ERASMUS building that hosts ESA activities on Human Spaceflight, Microgravity research and planetary Robotics.

- by virtual presentation, the ESA Spacecraft Test Centre which is located at a restricted area in ESTEC. Although virtual, the presentation allows us to see the test facilities from angles that is impossible to view during a physical visit.

Industrial visits

On Thursday 30 October and also on Saturday 1 November we will visit a number of locally based Space Companies to get an impression of a real environment where space hardware is built much of it in the area of Optics. On Thursday we plan to visit:

- AIRBUS, one of the main Spacecraft manufacturers world wide

- SRON, a Dutch Research and Technology Centre very active in manufacturing Optical Instruments for Space

On Saturday we will visit COSINE, a new company active in the area of miniature Space Optics instruments.