Theo Bessel

Flight Software Intern @European Space Agency - ESA

Noordwijk, NL

A 6 month internship in the flight software section at ESTEC (ESA) in Noordwijk (Netherlands).I joined ESA\'s TEC-EDS section on July 1, 2025, with the following internship topic: Reliability Driven Code Testing. Behind this title lie several very interesting tasks- Setting up a static code analysis toolchain to calculate complexity metrics in critical embedded code in order to detect potential bugs- Integrating automatic testing methodologies (fuzz testing, symbolic execution, etc.) with the aim of trying to find bugs when erroneous inputs appear in the software- Applying this methodology to the EMSL project, a mass spectrometer for the LUPEX lunar rover mission as part of a collaboration between ESA and JAXA (Japanese space agency).I am currently working on a static analyzer based on the low-level Clang/LLVM C++ API, enabling complexity analyses as well as the detection of “code smells,” or bad coding practices indicating potential bug locations. This especially uses advanced analyses techniques such as Abstract Interpretation.