Rush Students to run experiments in low earth orbit next week!
Last year there was only one successful Irish entry to the Mission Space Lab so we're extremely proud to announce that an astonishing nine groups from St. Joseph's Secondary school have successfully made it through to Phase 3 this year! These student experiments have now achieved "Flight Status" and will run on the International Space Station over the next fortnight. Each experiment is written in Python Code on a special Raspberry Pi Astro Pi Computer on board the ISS. Each experiment runs for three hours so that is an unbelievable twenty-seven hours of runtime in space for our students in total. Only 214 of the very best experiments from 21 countries made it as far as Phase 3 Flight Status so this is a tremendous achievement. The code will return thousands of photographs from space as well as other scientific data such as measurements of the earth's magnetic field strength.
Here are the students that will be running experiments in space next week:
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Team Name
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Team Members
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Experiment
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DRSpace
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Ross, Dara, Scott, Karl
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Investigating ecological sea/coastal pollution/damage over time
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Team Erosion
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Kevin, Kieran
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Coastline erosion over time viewed from space
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Magnetos
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Colin, Nicki, Josh
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Measuring the magnetosphere around the earth
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DGenEx
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Niamh, Fionn
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Recent changes in rivers meanders using space photography
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EpicSpaceCoders
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Jessica, Liam, Morgan and Luke
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Investigating levels of deforestation over the last ten years
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Two Imposters
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Cameron and Aaron
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The effects of wildfires on forests viewed from the ISS
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Cloud Atlas
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Daniel O Brien and Jordan
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Measuring cloud Albedo using infrared photography
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Blue Cobras
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Ethan, James, Todd & Daniel Lukau
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Does temperature affect the visible ocean colour from space?
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Ground Breakers
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Raheem, Sadhbh
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An algorithm to automatically detect if the ISS is over land or sea
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Danny Murray would like to thank all of those 6th year students who took time over the mid-term to submit their code and Mr. Grimes to helped with half of the groups. He'd also like to thank Stephanie O' Neil, and ESERO and Science Foundation Ireland for their huge help with getting so many teams through this year. Finally, well done also to David Frew's talented students in Mount Temple School that also qualified for flight status this year.
Mr. Murray: "One of my most fond memories of this year will be Cameron Currie getting up at 6am on a Friday over mid-term to work in the fields, rushing home for 12pm to code experiment for the International Space Station and an hour long video call with me (and my 1-year-old Freya) to fix bugs before he runs back out to work in the fields for 2pm. It's probably the most Rush County Dublin thing I can imagine. It's hard work, astronomical ambition and fresh vegetables in equal measure. What an absolute hero!"
https://www.esa.int/Education/AstroPI/214_teams_granted_Flight_Status_for_Phase_3_of_Mission_Space_Lab_2020-21