Flight Dynamics Engineer – Mission Design Service (f/m/d)

Who You Are

You are passionate about space flight dynamics and looking for a meaningful opportunity to enfold your talents? Then you are on the right track!

We are supporting the European Space Agency with highly qualified services at the European Operations Control Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt. For a new service position within the flight dynamics division, we are searching for a flight dynamics authority to complement our international service team!

What You Will Focus on

You will provide support to the Mission Analysis section primarily for interplanetary missions and planetary defense. This includes trajectory optimisation for interplanetary transfer and science phases, as well as navigation and guidance, including optical navigation.

Furthermore, you will support concurrent design studies for future space missions and contribute to the mission analysis tools development.

Additional tasks include supporting other projects, scientists, and industry, and participation in reviews.

What You Bring

Essentially

• University degree in a relevant engineering field, astronomy, mathematics, or physics.
• An outstanding expertise in trajectory optimisation, including the multi-body problem.
• Skills in navigation and guidance techniques, including Optical Navigation.
• Experience in Software Development: Python, C++, and shell scripting.
• Experience in Mission Analysis Tools Development: local and global optimisation techniques and algorithms, covariance and Monte-Carlo analysis, environmental models, numerical integration techniques.
• Proficiency in classical mechanics, including kinematics and dynamics of point masses, dynamics of rigid bodies, non-inertial reference frames, rotation dynamics expressed in body-fixed frames, conservation laws in mechanics, gravitational forces and fields, orbit dynamics, Keplerian orbits, and Kepler laws.
• Ability to apply above knowledge to develop solutions to technical problems in cooperation with customers and other specialists.
• Knowledge about operational and ground segment aspects in mission/architecture design.
• Desire to extend technical skills.
• A high sense of operational responsibility and good communication skills.
• Fluency in English, both in speech and writing.
• Ability to coordinate and interact with other service providers in operations and other fields.
• Ability to work independently.

Desirably

• Familiarity with the ESOC environment.
• Previous operational experience in Flight Dynamics or spacecraft missions in general.
• Familiarity with modern software development tools (git, CI/CD, CMake, docker…).
• Experience with Linux, network services and protocols, and system administration.
• The ability to multi-task efficiently, working on multiple activities, multiple subsystems, and if applicable, multiple missions simultaneously.
• Knowledge about current and planned ESA missions should be a given.

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