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59 young researchers from ESA’s Member States recently attended the 2012 Alpbach Summer School. Held each year in the beautiful Austrian Tyrol, the school offers a unique educational experience for promising scientists and engineers.
The 2012 meeting, held 24 July-3 August, was developed around the theme "Exploration of the Giant Planets and their Systems". As usual, the programme was divided into two sections. Students attended introductory lectures, followed by workshops where teams of students were asked to design their own innovative space mission, supported and assisted by the lecturers and tutors. On the last day of the summer school, each group presented its mission concept to a panel of experts, chaired by Roger Bonnet, the Director of the International Space Science Institute.

The missions:
The proposals put forward by the four teams were:

Team Orange – Investigative Tour Of Uranus (iTour)
A mission to send an orbiter to Uranus, in order to investigate its atmospheric composition and inner structure, as well as the moons and rings of the Uranus system.

Team Red - The Neptune Triton Explorer (Nete)
A low-flying Neptune orbiter mission to study the planet’s atmosphere, meteorology, inner structure and gravitational field.

Team Blue - Poseidon / Trident
A flyby mission to study Neptune’s gravitational field and internal structure. An atmospheric probe would study the composition of the lower atmosphere.

Team Green – Uranus System Explorer (USE)
A Uranus orbiter mission to investigate the planet’s magnetic field, clouds, moons and ring system, with an atmospheric probe to analyse the composition of the deeper atmosphere.

The Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) and ESA offered graduates of the summer school the option to continue developing the proposed iTour mission to Uranus at a workshop in Graz, Austria (25-30 November 2012). To read more about the proposed missions and what the panel thought of them, follow this link.

The Alpbach Summer School 2012 was organised by the Aeronautics and Space Agency of the FFG. It was co-sponsored by ESA and the national space authorities of its Member and Cooperating States, with the support of the International Space Science Institute (ISSI), Austrospace and Europlanet.