The Astro Pi Challenge, organised by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, is now open. The Romanian Space Agency (ROSA) invites young people from all over Romania to create and send a code that could run on the computers onboard the International Space Station (ISS). The European AstroPi Challenge is divided into Mission Zero (deadline 20 March 2020) and Mission Space Lab (deadline 25 October 2019).
Mission Zero
Mission Zero offers students and young people the chance to have their computer programmes run in space on the ISS. Teams write a simple programme to display a message to the astronauts onboard. They don’t need special equipment or coding skills, and all participants that follow the rules are guaranteed to have their programmes run in space. They will also receive a special certificate showing where exactly the ISS was when their programme ran.
Anyone who is 14 years or younger can take part in the competition in teams of two to four people, supervised by a teacher or mentor. Further participation conditions are available here.
The deadline for submissions is 20 March 2020.
Mission Space Lab
For Mission Space Lab, the challenge is to design and program an experiment to run on an Astro Pi computer onboard the ISS. The best experiments will be deployed to the ISS, and their team will have the opportunity to analyse their results and put together a short report about their findings. The ten teams that write the best reports will be selected as the Astro Pi Mission Space Lab winners.
Anyone who is 19 years or younger at the time of submission can take part in the competition, in teams of two to six people, supervised by a teacher or mentor. Further participation conditions are available here.
Phase 1 – Design of Mission Space Lab is now open. At this stage, teams need to come up with an idea for an experiment. No coding is required yet, but teams should think about how they might write a program to make sure the goal is achievable. Teams and ideas should be registered on the Astro Pi Mission Space Lab.
The deadline for registration is 25 October 2019.
The official conditions for participation as well as further details are available here.
Image credit: European Space Agency (ESA)