Raspberry Pis in space? It's true! The International Space Station (ISS) is home to a custom Raspberry Pi (opens in new tab) setup known as Astro Pi. It revolves around our planet, and today it's running custom programs designed by teens here on Earth as part of a contest.
The European Astro Pi challenge has two entry categories: Mission Zero for creators under age 14 and Mission Space Lab for those under 19. Today, the Astro Pi team officially announced the winning Mission Space Lab (opens in new tab) experiments have been sent to the ISS. The Mission Zero submission deadline just passed on March 20, so it won't be long before we see their projects make it into orbit, as well.
The teams come from a total of 22 European countries. The winning teams will have an opportunity to compile their experiment results after they receive the project findings back from the ISS.
The projects vary in what they can measure and take advantage of the Sense Hat, a custom board designed specifically for the Astro Pi mission. It includes sensors for barometric pressure, temperature and humidity. It also has an on-board gyroscope, accelerometer and a magnetometer. These aren't exclusive, either. You can buy a Sense Hat (opens in new tab) on the official Raspberry Pi website. It even has a custom Python library.
Richard Hayler, Citizen Science Program Manager at Raspberry Pi, said via Twitter that, they're not yet sharing details on the experiences, but "once the experiments have run and the teams get the results back, we enter phase 3, where all the cool analysis takes place."
If you want to follow this project, check out the official Astro Pi Twitter (opens in new tab) for more updates. Congratulations to all of the Mission Space Lab participants and winners! Your ingenuity is what makes the Raspberry Pi community so exciting.
