There are just a few more hours left for computer science students to submit their proposals for the European Space Agency's Summer of Code. For the fourth year, ESA is again offering stipends for students to work on 23 pre-selected and space-related open source projects. The students will be working with one or more mentors. The registration deadline passes at 11 tonight.
As in the previous years, ESA is preparing for a wave of last-minute submissions, comments Maxime Perrotin, who is coordinating the project for ESA. "Students seem to wait for the very last minute to register. During the past few hours we received 25 submissions, bringing the number so far to 40." The deadline will not be extended, except maybe in the off-change that some projects do not receive proposals, he says. "But based on our past experience, I don't expect that."
Two weeks from tomorrow, the projects will have selected their students and coding can begin. This years' projects include Stellarium, planetarium software, that can be used to display astronomical objects on computers, and for projecting on domes. The software developers hope to get students help them develop an easy way to download catalogues of astronomical objects, or come up with a solution to improve rendering for some of the astronomical objects.
Space flights software
Another project looking for students is related to GNU Radio, open source software for building software-defined radios. The project hopes students will help find computational bottleneck in some of its real-time projects. A third option involves helping development of Orekit, a Java library providing a core layer for space flights dynamics applications. The project wants to develop support for data loading from SQL databases, write a demonstration application or create a web application for orbit propagation with operational forecasts.
In total, 21 projects registered with ESA, almost the same number as last year. Perrotin: "In 2013 we had 90 proposals submitted by students, covering 23 projects. The vast majority of projects succeeds, and that means the students receive their 4000 euro stipend."
More information:
ESA Summer of Code in Space
Selected projects and mentor organisations