Internship - Automated validation of operational scenarios in the mission control system for spacecraft operations

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About Aerospacelab

Our mission is supported by an ambitious vertically integrated approach: design & manufacture of small satellites combined with development of earth observation services.

Since its creation in 2018, the company has already grown substantially. Our team gathers more than 25 engineering expertise, from hardware design to software development & data science.

In 2026, Aerospacelab counts offices in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium), Toulouse (France), Lausanne (Switzerland) and US West Coast with more than 450 full-time employees, with the ambition to position itself as the European leader in small satellites.

Context

The mission control system is the central tool through which operators plan, command and monitor spacecrafts. Every new feature or action must be validated against realistic operational conditions before it is used in the real satellite. Today this validation relies largely on manually running operational cases, which is time-consuming, depends on who runs the tests, and makes it hard to repeat the same checks.

As part of our Satellite Operations team the intern’s goal will be to make that validation automated and systematic.

Objective

Define a library of operational scenarios and automate their validation in the mission control system against a simulator.

Tasks

Define the relevant operational scenarios: routine nominal day, heavy acquisition uplink, maneuver cancellation, bad link , etc.
Prepare reference results for each scenario.
Automate the playback of the scenarios and the comparison with the references.