ACTIVITIES

On Friday, 6 February 2015, Timisoara hosted the first meeting of the “Space Ambassadors”, event attended by Mr. Virgil Pop, ESERO Romania manager from the Romanian Space Agency, Mrs. Clara Cruz Niggebrugge, coordinator of the ESERO project at the European Space Agency level and the eight Space Ambassadors.

Update 5.03.2015: The team composed of the Romanian students Alex Danţis, Alex Dumitrescu and Anda Truta, together with Julian Laval from France, all of them studying at the UK’s University of Bristol, won the first prize of the annual ESA App Camp with their FarmIQ application. Details here.

Three Romanian students are members of the teams selected for the annual ESA App Camp, following an intense Appathon weekend held simultaneously at six ESA Business Incubation Centres and partner locations across Europe on 24–25 January. More than 170 participants from about 30 nations have competed to win a ticked for the ESA App Camp, which will take place in Barcelona from 25 February to 3 March.

The Romanian Space Agency (ROSA) invites school students aged between 11 and 19 to apply to the second space robotics competition organised by the European Space Agency (ESA). The participants are challenged to design a robot that can move cargo from one end of an International Space Station (ISS) mock-up to another.

Update 13 July 2015: From 8 to 10 July, more than 100 primary and secondary school teachers from 18 ESA Member States took part in the ESA Summer Teachers Workshop at ESA’s Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.

Top level space experts, such as ESA astronaut André Kuipers, Rosetta Project Scientist Matt Taylor, award-winning solar astrophysicist Pål Brekke, and ESA Copernicus Space Segment Manager Guido Levrini gave teachers unprecedented access to inside information from the people directly involved in the various space projects.

Romania ESERO invites studentes and secondary school teacher to enroll the first national CanSat competition - Romania 2015, until 5 January 2015.

Teams of four students (aged over 14 years until 1th April 2015) coordinated by a teacher will complete until this date a registration form available online and they will send it by e-mail at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

The subprogram Research projects to stimulate the establishment of young independent research teams has been launched within the Human Resources Program of the National Plan for RDI, 2014 competition.

The aim of the competition is to support young researchers, with a PhD, who have just started or are already strengthening a research team, after they established a program of independent research, obtaining significant results in their specific field.

2014 high school graduates with excellent results during high school, which were obtained at international Olympiads or international / global innovation competitions (awards I, II, III / gold, silver, bronze medals or other equivalent awards) are invited to apply for the Young Researcher Scholarship 2014, which aims to stimulate youth with exceptional results to perform their studies in the country and to integrate them into a competitive research group within a higher education institution in Romania.

At the 15th year when it is celebrated worldwide, World Space Week was coordinated in our country, like every time since 1999, by the Romanian Space Agency, during 4-10 October 2014. During this week, nationally there were organized over 50 activities dedicated to space and especially to satellite navigation systems, such as GPS and Galileo.

The team composed by Manuel Ciosici, a Romanian student established in Denmark, and three Danish students won the first prize of the third annual ESA App Camp, an event which took place at ESA’s ESRIN(the European Space Research Institute) centre in Frascati, Italy, and gathered twenty app developers from 11 countries.

Manuel Ciosici is describing the ESA App Camp experience as being unique and a real challenge:

Update 23.02.2015: The HyperMed team, composed of three Romanian students, is one of the four teams selected to develop and conduct their experiments under hypergravity conditions during the sixth ‘Spin Your Thesis!’ campaign. Further details are available here.

The Romanian Space Agency (ROSA) invites teams of Romanian university students to submit proposals for the next “Spin Your Thesis!” campaign which will take place in the autumn of 2015 and will offer them the opportunity to conduct hypergravity experiments.

The sixth SYT campaign, which will take place September-October 2015, is open to four teams of undergraduate, graduate and PhD students from ESA Member or Cooperating States.

40 teachers from 17 ESA Member States took part at the annual ESA Summer Workshop for teachers hosted at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, between 21 - 25 July 2014.

During this event dedicated to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) secondary school teachers, they were introduced to various methods and resources that allows them to bring space into their classroom. Ovidin Trofin, the Romanian teacher who took part at the event, summed up the workshop by saying:

“I saw something written on the wall of the Space Expo museum next to ESTEC which I think is so true:« Earth needs more Space ».”

ESERO Romania organises, from 4 to 7 September 2014, an introductory space activities and technologies course. The course will be held in Mărișel, Cluj County, at the location of the „Next Generation" Summer School.

Content: The course is aimed at using the space as an attractive context for teaching STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics).

Participants will engage in topics such as the presentation of ESERO Romania, the educational resources of the European Space Agency, astronomy basics, artificial satellites of the Earth, space telecommunications basics, CanSat and practical activities