Young people taking part in the European Astro Pi Challenge will soon see their computer programs...
ESA / Education / AstroPI. Young people taking part in the European Astro Pi Challenge will soon see their computer programs running on the International Space Station! The codes will be 'uplinked' to the Astro Pi computers and start running in the coming few weeks.
Teams taking part in Mission Space Lab were tasked with writing a program that calculates the speed at which the ISS is orbiting planet Earth.
Programs submitted must pass a rigorous testing process jointly led by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and ESA before they can be sent into space.
This year, 236 teams have been awarded Flight Status, which means that their programs will run on the Astro Pi computers.
These teams represent 889 young people from across Europe and the ESA Member States.
Some teams have opted to take photos and use them to calculate the distance between two points, and how long it took for the ISS to pass over them to find the speed.
All teams that chose to take multiple samples from the Astro Pi sense hat or multiple images had to decide how to output a final estimate for the speed of the ISS. Most teams opted to use the mean average, but a few teams chose to filter their samples to choose only the 'best' ones based on prior knowledge, while others used a machine learning model and the Coral Machine Learning dongle to select which images or data samples to use.
Every year the Astro Pi programs run from the end of April until the end of May in a near continuous schedule.
Mission Zero offers young people the chance to have their code run in space by writing a simple program to take a reading from the colour and luminosity sensor on an Astro Pi computer on board the International Space Station, and use it to set the background colour in a personalised image.
Of those, 15,942 passed testing and will have their pixel art creations run on the ISS from mid-May. Once again, the Astro Pi team has been amazed by the wonderful images and animations that young people have created; reviewing the submissions is always one of the most enjoyable and inspiring moments for the team.