During the February half-term holiday, team Space Y entered the competition Astro Pi Mission Space Lab, in which we designed a computer programme to measure the speed of the International Space Station (ISS). It was to be run on a Raspberry Pi computer on board the ISS, and would work by taking several photos of Earth seven seconds apart, then measuring the distance travelled in that time using image feature recognition, and hence work out the speed.
Although we did not have any prior experience with a project like this, we decided to enter, and eventually, we found that our code had worked, and that it had run for 10 minutes while the ISS was travelling over the Horn of Africa. Having succeeded in the competition, we were then given the opportunity to partake in an online Q&A session with the ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano, which was a very interesting and useful experience, where we learned a lot about life as an astronaut, especially what it is really like to spend time on the ISS.
Overall, we learned a lot from partaking in this competition and would strongly recommend it to anyone with a passion for computer programming and space!
Krishie (Divs)
