A partnership between the Raspberry Pi Foundation, UK Space, the European Space Agency and British astronaut Tim Peake is sending two Raspberry Pis into orbit! This exciting development, called “Astro Pi”, gets even more thrilling: school children will be given the opportunity to send their code up to the Pis and have them run scientific experiments in gravity-less conditions.
The Pis will be fitted with a HAT that exposes several different sensors and the schools involved will receive units that they can test their code out on before they finalise the code and transmit it. You can see a (slightly blurry) Vine of the HAT below:
This is simply fantastic in my opinion – the chance for school kids to get involved in space exploration and science really fires the imagination.
You can read more about the competition, which will launch properly at BETT in January, on the Raspberry Pi Foundation blog. There’s also a dedicated website that you can take a browse through for inspiration.
You can read and watch a BBC news report about the project here or below: