europa

SE2024 student Ryan Dancy will present at the Lunary and Planetary Science Conference in Texas next month, based on his project from EE-584 Spacecraft Design and System Engineering, taken while on exchange at EPFL in Switzerland. This project applies the decision-oriented approach to systems architecture to design a mission concept for an explorer probe to Europa.

Europa is a moon of Jupiter that was discovered by Galileo in 1610, and is known to have water and ice. NASA has existing plans to send a probe to Europa, and this project considered a different point in the design space. 

Ryan has also had three co-op internships in the aerospace field. In summer 2022 he worked on AR/VR applications for lunar rovers at the European Space Agency's European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. He is currently on his second co-op internship at Mission Control in Ottawa, which is on track to be the first company to ever demonstrate deep learning AI software on the moon.