Satellite Navigation Applications Trainee

Meritxell was born the 8th of February of 1984 in Calella (Barcelona). She got graduated in 2006 as Aeronautics Technical Engineer by the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Spain, and currently she is studying Aeronautical Engineering at UPC. She is also Alumni of the Communauté des Villes Ariane (CVA) and of the International Space University (ISU). She is part of CTAE’s staff since 1st of July, 2008.

In the faculty of Castelldefels (UPC) she got specialized in Air Navigation. This gave her a new view of engineering and opened to her the doors of an unknown domain that has resulted into one of her passions. Her areas of interest include also Space and Aeronautical Telecommunications, Control Systems and Avionics.

Due to the previous, she applied for CTAE as her first professional engineering job. She joined the company in summer 2007 as Satellite Navigation Applications Trainee as a part of a UAV (Unmnanned Aerial Vehicles) project. In summer 2004 she also collaborated in ESA’s LISA Pathfinder project in the Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC) where her work was supervised by Dr. Enrique García-Berro. Her Degree Project (2006) was devoted to satellite formation flying.

As complements of her formation, in summer 2005 she took part of the CVA Summer School in Barcelona; in 2006 she attended the 7th Atelier Paraspatial Session, organised by Terre & Espace in Toulouse, France, where she practised para-dive (free fall), para-gliding (ZeroG and 5G with glider) and scuba-diving; the same year she won a contest organized by the Council of Barcelona to represent Barcelona as a space-related student, for the launch of the Ariane 5 “Ciutat de Barcelona”, from Kourou, French Guyana; in 2007, thanks to the support from ESA and Barcelona's Council, she attended the ISU Summer Space Program (SSP) 2007 in Beijing; she also offered herself as a 5G bungee-naut for a life-sciences experiment during ISU SSP07; in 2008 she won the 1st International Cansat Competition, organized by LEEM-UPM in Madrid, Spain as part of the WeCanSat Team; and finally, in May 2008, she participated in the Google Lunar XPrize Student Competition in Strasbourg, France, as part of the UPC Team.

Nowadays, Meritxell is a member of the Association Euroavia-Terrassa. She enjoys experiencing, astronomy, music, travelling, and flying.