Latvian National Graduate Trainee in Spaceship EAC and LUNA Robotics

The Directorate of Human and Robotic Exploration is the main ESA entity in charge of supporting the current and future endeavours in the domain of human spaceflight. Space exploration plays a strategic part in securing a central role for Europe with respect to global initiatives. The European Exploration Envelope Programme (E3P) integrates ESA's activities in the field into a single exploration process. The strategy encompasses three destinations where humans will work with robots to gather knowledge: low earth orbit (LEO), the Moon and Mars. The Spaceship EAC initiative investigates low Technology Readiness Level (TRL) technologies that may support future exploration space missions as well as surface activities on the Moon. It is driven by the ExPeRT (Exploration Preparation, Research and Technology) team, a multidisciplinary, innovation-driven group of researchers, graduate and undergraduate students based at the ESA European Astronaut Centre (EAC). The mission statement of Spaceship EAC is centred on three main pillars: enhance, enable and inspire. Its founding idea is to enhance the capabilities of EAC by drawing on the Centre's experience in spaceflight to develop and validate new operational concepts and valuable technologies in support of human and robotic lunar exploration scenarios. At EAC, a number of precursor robotic activities have been pursued, such as Meteron, MARVIN, SUPVIS-M and ANALOG-1, to build up practical experience in surface robotics, teleoperation, autonomy and end-to-end mission operations in analogue conditions. As exploration evolves from ISS-centric operations towards future lunar surface missions, EAC is expanding its ability to host robotic systems and lander-related operational concepts that will underpin those missions. To that end, the joint ESA–DLR LUNA facility has been established to provide a representative lunar analogue environment where technologies and surface robotic systems can be matured through iterative test campaigns. The campaigns include mobility and navigation on regolith, surface operations and logistics, payload/lander interfaces, deployment and commissioning sequences, communication and supervision concepts, and system robustness under realistic operational constraints. LUNA serves as a central hub for lunar exploration preparation at ESA and DLR, featuring a lunar surface testbed of approximately 700 m² to support technology demonstrations, future training and operational validation for Moon exploration. In the role, developing a general robotics capability based on commercial off the shelf (COTS) elements for the LUNA facility is envisaged. Such a capability would support general test payloads, as well as locomotion, positioning and remote teleoperation across multiple sites. It is envisaged that the role will support the activities of the Spaceship Initiatives project and the ongoing development of LUNA around this theme.