20 July 2011, 16:03

ESA Summer of Code in Space

With its ESA Summer of Code in Space, the European Space Agency (ESA) is sponsoring the development of open source software that is space related. As part of this event, which is organised in a similar way to the Google Summer of Code, mentors suggest projects – the list of mentoring organisations includes the KStars virtual KDE planetarium and the Marble desktop atlas; NASA, with its World Wind project; the Spanish Universidad de Extremadura's Robolab; the Rock robot construction kit; and the ffmpeg project.

The deadline for students to apply for one of the projects is 27 July 2011 and programming is scheduled to start on 1 August – solutions must be submitted no later than 30 October and will then be evaluated. According to the FAQ, student stipends are to be paid on a similar model to that used by Google's Summer of Code: an initial payment of €1000 will be paid at the start of the coding period, with a final payment of €3000 at the end, provided the student's coding project was judged to be successful by the mentoring organisation.

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