14 DAY TRIAL // Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of man's fabled space shuttles, headed beyond the atmosphere to carry little things like 3D printers and Raspberry Pi PCs to the International Space Station, just to prove they can.
Butchered intros from science fiction series aside, there's been quite a bit of hubbub surrounding the International Space Station lately.
Much of it has to do with the fact that things can finally be manufactured in space. It's very small scale, granted, but there's finally a 3D printer up there. It wasn't easy to create an additive manufacturing machine that could work in zero gravity.
Now, though, something else caught our attention: the Raspberry Pi credit card-sized computer. That little PC that gained world fame despite being intended as merely a means for children to more easily learn programming in school.
Raspberry Pi is being sent to space
The Astro Pi project has been announced, set to take place from the middle of January 2015. It will see devices containing code written by primary and secondary school children sent to the ISS.
“Tim Peake plans to deploy the Astro Pi computers in a number of different locations on board the ISS,” wrote the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Tim Peake is an astronaut from the British ESA and will take two Raspberry Pi PCs with him on the mission set to begin next year.
Peake will be in space for six months and will deploy the Raspbery Pi PCs around the station, where the ISS Crew will test the code.
The goal is to foster interest in coding and space exploration among young children. What better incentive than to tell them they could have their projects sent into orbit with real astronauts?
The scope of the contest
Children will have to come up with ideas for apps that can run in space, or experiments involving the Raspberry Pi credit card-sized computer. There are five themes: Spacecraft Sensors, Satellite Imaging, Space Measurements, Data Fusion, and Space Radiation.
The two best ideas submitted will be interpreted by the Astro Pi team and coded by the Raspberry Pi Foundation for flight on the ISS.
The Raspberri Pi boards taken by Peake to the ISS will both be connected to a new Astro Pi board which, through its sensors and gadgets, will run the apps submitted by the kids.
The best code, or codes, will be selected and set to run on the station. The data generated and recorded during the runtime will then be downloaded back to Earth and distributed to the winning teams.
