Astro Pi | Facebook

Image Credit: NASA
Get an Astronaut to run your
class’s experiments in Space
British ESA Astronaut, Tim Peake, invites you and your class to take
part in an out of this world competition to design and programme
experiments and applications to be run on the International Space
Station as part of Tim’s mission later this year.
The competition is open to Primary and Secondary students in the UK and is about
programming an Astro Pi pocket sized computer (a Raspberry Pi with a sensor packed
add-on board) to run experiments on the International Space Station as part of Tim’s
mission.
Primary Students
Secondary Students
Submit your idea for using the Astro
Pi on ISS. The Raspberry Pi team will
code the winning experiments for
Tim to run.
Generate your ideas for Astro Pi. Submit
by 3 April 2015 for a chance of winning a
Raspberry Pi computer and Astro Pi board.
Then code your idea in Python and
submit it by 29 June 2015.
Closing Date: 3 April 2015
www.astro-pi.org
@astro_pi
Astro Pi
Education Resources: tinyurl.com/astro-pi
Leading UK Space companies, in partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the
UK Space Agency, are running this competition to inspire children and young people to
take up STEM subjects and show the opportunities for careers in the space industry.
Winning teams will have their idea run in space by British ESA Astronaut Tim Peake and
there are many other prizes available in age and content categories.
Raspberry Pi and ESERO UK have produced a wide range of educational resources to
support the competition. Resources include all you need to know about how to code
the Astro Pi and how the sensors link to other areas of the curriculum.
To help students on their way in developing their code, five inspirational themes have
been devised to stimulate creativity and scientific thinking:
Space Measurements: Every aspect of human activity involves measurement of some type and it is a critical part of
many applications including the space industry. What would you do to improve the accuracy of the measurements
you can make with the Astro Pi and how will you demonstrate this?
Spacecraft Sensors: Satellites not only provide a unique perspective of our planet but also allow us to explore the
universe. How would you use the sensors on the Astro Pi to calculate your orientation or to tell you about what’s
going on in the ISS?
Satellite Imaging and Remote Sensing: Satellites often carry imagers on-board in order to take pictures of Earth,
other planets, comets, and even galaxies. The Astro Pi has a camera on each board working at either visible or
infra-red wavelengths which you can use to image inside the ISS or out of a window. What would you do with these
cameras?
Space Radiation: Space is a hostile environment full of high energy radiation. You might use the Astro Pi camera to
record these particles as they pass through the Astro Pi camera’s detector. You could also compare what you see on
the ground with what you see on the ISS. Or you could even launch an Astro Pi on a weather balloon and compare
what you see at a high altitude in the Earth’s atmosphere. How would you go about doing this?
Data Fusion: In space and on the ground you often derive information from multiple sensors that could not be
obtained via one sensor operating alone. Satellites frequently do this by processing multiple data sources to learn
new things about the environment they’re observing. How would you use the Astro Pi to demonstrate these
principles?
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