Young scientists Martin P-S and Caleb S (Year 11) have won the international Mission Space Lab European Astro Pi Challenge 2020-21.
Martin, Caleb and their friend Daniel (from The Perse) formed Team Magrix, one of 10 winning teams from across Europe who created scientific experiments that ran on two Astro Pi computers onboard the International Space Station (ISS).
The competition, run by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the European Space Agency (ESA) Education, was for young people up to the age of 19. It attracted more than 400 teams of young people from around the world. Martin heard about it and asked Caleb and Daniel to join him in the Magtrix experiment. Magtrix analysed whether geographical features of Earth such as mountains affect the planet’s magnetic field using the Astro Pi’s magnetometer, GPS data, and photos of Earth captured by the Astro Pi’s camera.
Ali Annett, Physics teacher and STEM coordinator at The Leys, agreed to supervise them. The boys arranged meetings on Google Meet and started their own online repository for their coding files. They made it through the selection process which meant they had the chance to analyse the data captured during their experiment’s three-hour runtime on the ISS. They then wrote a short report describing their experiment’s hypothesis, methods, results, and conclusions.
The Magrix experiment made use of the capacities of the Raspberry Pi, which include magnometers and pressure sensors. The boys wrote code that could run automatically in the Raspberry Pi onboard the ISS.
All participants were congratulated by the organisers for their efforts, especially given the obstacles many teams had to overcome because of the coronavirus pandemic. The winners “demonstrated great scientific merit and innovative use of the Astro Pi hardware”.