Bachelor Student Prize Winner

Eighteen students completed their bachelor's degree in 2021 with a thesis that was labelled ‘excellent’ by their faculty. Here you will find a short introduction to these excellent theses in the form of an "elevator pitch" from each student, plus a video in which the supervisor briefly addresses the lucky winner.

Valentine Aliberti

  Faculty of Science and Engineering | Bachelor Maastricht Science Programme

"Preparing for Bepicolombo with 3D simulations of Mercury’s Magnetosphere"

Valentine's elevator pitch
During my thesis, I studied the interaction between the magnetosphere of the planet Mercury and the solar wind, a stream of charged particles released from the Sun. I ran numerical simulations with different magnetic field models of Mercury, and I visualized them in 3D. My bachelor thesis was very interesting as I was part of a scientific team preparing for the first flyby of a spacecraft named "BepiColombo". My project had a real scientific impact, as I plotted the magnetic field profiles of the different models along the trajectory of BepiColombo’s first flyby. I conducted my thesis at the research institute in astrophysics and planetology in France.