Installed during summer 2008, ISU now owns a fully automated satellite tracking station, known as ISU Ground Station. This Ground Station comes to open several hands-on training opportunities for the Masters students, as satellite communication is now a reality at ISU.

ISU Ground Station was built in the scope of the Global Educational Network for Satellite Operations (GENSO) project (www.genso.org), an endeavour involving students worldwide and promoted by the International Space Education Board (ISEB), an organization consisting of the Educational Departments of some of the major space agencies worldwide.

The number of companies and organizations developing facilities oriented towards the application of the principles of Concurrent Engineering is steadily growing worldwide. Concurrent Engineering is a systematic approach to integrated product development focused on the team values of cooperation, trust and sharing, that focuses in the response to customer expectations.

At ESA establishment European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), Noordwijk, the Netherlands, the application of concurrent engineering principles is undertaken at the site known as Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) (www.esa.int/CDF).

Apart from the historically available window to the Universe at visible light, the discovery in the 1940s of radio emissions from the sky has lead to the development of Radio Astronomy as another essential means to study celestial objects. Observations in this frequency domain provide a substantial complement to optical observations, as is exemplified by the discovery of new classes of objects such as pulsars, quasars, and radio galaxies, the detection of the widespread presence of simple and complex molecules in interstellar space, and the discovery of the cosmological microwave background, one of the evidences for the 'Big Bang' model of the Universe.

The Radio Telescopes at ISU give students the opportunity of performing observations as well as the necessary analysis, which introduces them to typical techniques of astrophysical research and gives them a first-hand experience in the study of the invisible Universe.