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Aurora is a daughter company of LSE Space who themselves are part of the SSC group. We are a friendly business, operate autonomously and benefit from our relationship within this corporate structure.

System and Software Engineering for GAIA (SRE-002)

Aurora is an established supplier of skilled manpower to ESA and in particular at ESTEC and ESAC. Aurora has the opportunity to expand our support to Gaia within the Science and Robotic Exploration Directorate (D/SRE). Aurora currently has a team of 16 engineers and scientists at ESAC including 4 on GAIA itself.

Overview

The Gaia mission is planning to map to microarcsecond accuracy 1% of the stellar population of our galaxy - that is around one thousand million objects. Each object will be seen about 100 times over the five year mission. The data reduction of the ~100 Terabytes of downlinked data is estimated to require a Petabyte storage system.

The processing will be community wide effort performed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) in which ESAC play a coordination role.

The ESAC team is heavily involved in DPAC especially in the overall architecture and the core processing. The core processing includes initial data treatment and the Astrometric Global Iterative Solution (AGIS) to solve for the many unknown astrometric parameters. The processing is distributed over five locations and ESAC will form the hub for data exchange via the Main Database. This main database will form the input for all processing and will be augmented with the output of all processing to arrive at a new version.

One of the vital tasks of SOC is integration and execution of the daily processing chain. This is comprised of MIT (from SOC), IDT (from UB), FL (from ARI) and the IDTFLDB (from SOC).

The production of processing software for Gaia has started and will continue through operations to final catalogue production in 2019.

Specific tasks include:

• Further develop and maintain the IDFLDB
• Further develop and maintain the SOC coordinator system. This system handles messages between MIT,IDT, FL and provide monitoring of nodes and task completion status.
• Monitor the procurement and implementation of the algorithms from the Gaia scientific community into the development system
• Contribute to the definition of Interface Control Documents (ICDs) and file interchange formats with the external coordination units
• Participate in their optimisation, evaluation, and test results
• Interact appropriately with and support the algorithm providers
• Contribute to the maintenance of the overall system, including configuration control and versioning
• Provide testing and support E2E testing and operational rehearsals.
• Finally support and maintain the system into operations (2013)

For any candidate experience in interacting with the science community would be an advantage. The selected contractors must be willing operate in a team environment and to travel. Good interpersonal and communication skills are an advantage. You should be comfortable in an international working environment.

Specific qualification requirements

• University degree or equivalent in computer science or related fields
• Basic educational or work-acquired knowledge of astronomy/physics and standard numerical methods and techniques would be a strong asset
• At least 4 years experience in software engineering.

The chosen language for the Gaia Core processing is Java. The ESAC team has openings for candidates with strong Java skills. The candidate should be familiar with Eclipse, JUnit, Ant and Subversion. Knowledge and experience in at least some of the following is essential: large DBMS, distributed processing, numerical and statistical techniques. Scientific background is a strong advantage.

The candidate should have a good grasp of ECSS and be aware of required documentation on a large project. The candidate should have a solid Java background.

Experience working with large data volumes, ICDs, data dictionaries would be an asset.

Experience of messaging based systems is an advantage. Specific knowledge is required in the following areas:

• ECSS standards for software development
• JDK 1.6 / RMI / Generics
• OO design
• Database interaction with JDBC
• Distributed processing
• JUnit / Eclipse/ Ant
• Subversion
• Large Databases/data processing (>1TB)

In addition knowledge of LaTeX and C would be beneficial.

You must be able to work in English.

All applicants must be European Union citizens legally allowed to work in Spain without the need to obtain a work visa.

Location

The work will be performed at the ESAC, the European Space Astronomy Centre, at Villafranca del Castillo, near Madrid, Spain.

Contract

• You will be registered for both social security and tax in Spain.
• The standard working hours are 40 per week. There are 12 public holidays and an additional 29 annual days holiday.
• In addition to public health services Aurora provides private medical insurance in Spain.
• Training to improve efficiency and provide strength for future career are of course included.
• Aurora can assist financially and provide recent experience information for relocation.

To be considered for this Position

Provide prior to 10 February 2012 a summary of why you are a good candidate for the position together with a complete and detailed Recruitment Form to Mr. Alex Jeanes, at email alexjeanes@aurora.nl quoting reference SRE-002.

Aurora will agree conditional employment terms and conditions with candidates before presenting their recruitment form to ESA by 16 February 2012. ESA will select the candidates for interview and Aurora will provide for interview travel costs. Should ESA select you then a formal letter of employment shall be issued with an agreed start date.