Astro Pi Challenge Participants Run 9408 Programs on Two Pis in ISS

The European Astro Pi Challenge 2020/21 had nearly 15,000 participants across the two missions developing and running 9,408 programs on Izzy and Ed, the two Raspberry Pi models in the International Space Station.

Mission Zero was the most popular part of the Astro Challenge. This beginner mission had 14,054 participants from 24 countries, all under the age of 14, who wrote a simple program to measure the humidity in ISS Columbus using the Sense-HAT on the Raspberry Pi. They were able to display the measured value on the LED screen of the add-on, including a message to the astronauts. Each program ran for half a minute.

232 teams of a total of 939 young people under the age of 19 participated in Mission Space Lab. The purpose of this mission was to devise a scientific experiment, write a program for it and run it on the so-called Astro Pi’s. The Raspberry Pi Foundation writes that the students and young people recorded images of the Earth’s surface with the infrared camera, predicted weather patterns and studied variations in the Earth’s magnetic field.

Astro Pi is an educational project of the European Space Agency ESA and the Raspberry Pi Foundation to introduce children and young people to space travel and the possibilities of the Raspberry Pi computers.