A warm welcome to our seven new doctoral candidates who have started their programmes as part of the H2020 project REVOLVE. They will spend the next two months at Thales Alenia Space and will be mentored by Hervé Legay from the Research & Technology Department along with 15 experts from the company. The young researchers will use this two month period to settle into their own research path. They will plunge into real ‘industry culture’, familarize themselves with the Thales work environment, and also meet specialised engineers who will introduce them to the challenges inherent in the world of space communications.

The objective of our doctoral candidates is develop their scientific excellence so they will be capable of proposing disruptive solutions, techniques and methods, especially for very high throughput satellites (VHTS), mini-geo satellites, mega-constellations, convergence with 5G and more.They will then join our partners in this program to continue their research over the next two to three years. Each PhD student has a specific research project, with a personal secondment plan. Joint research is fostered through collaborative preparation of demonstrators and training in cohort. The student will be back in Toulouse for the last year, they will transfer to Thales Alenia Space the results of their research and any products that have been developed.

The REVOLVE project reflects our close relationship with our partners in academia, such as Heriot-Watt University in Edinburg and the IETR electronics and telecom research center in Rennes, with which we operate a joint lab dubbed Merlin. We have also teamed up with two partners specialized in new technologies, LSS in Munich, an expert in deployable structures, and Prodintec in Gijón (Spain), for additive manufacturing.