Celebrate another year of young people’s computer programs in space with us: today we and our collaborators at the European Space Agency can finally announce the winning and highly commended teams in this year’s Astro Pi Mission Space Lab.

Mission Space Lab: Young people’s experiments in space

In Mission Space Lab, teams of young people work together to create computer programs for scientific experiments to be carried out on the International Space Station. The programs they design and create run on the two Astro Pi computers: space-adapted Raspberry Pis with cameras and a range of sensors. 

Teams’ programs were deployed on the ISS during May and ran for up to 3 hours, collecting data for their experiments. Once we’d sent the teams their data, they started analysing it in order to write their Phase 4 reports. To identify patterns and phenomena they were interested in, many teams chose to compare their data with other sources.

We were especially excited to see the results from the experiments this year, particularly given that the upgraded Astro Pi units with their High Quality Cameras were positioned in a new observation window (WORF) on the ISS. This allowed teams to capture high-resolution images with a much wider field of view.

What have Mission Space Lab teams investigated this year?

We feel very privileged to see the culmination of the team’s experiments in their final reports. So let’s share a few highlights from this year’s experiments:

Team Aretusa from Sicily explored the effects of climate change by cross-referencing the images they captured with the Astro Pis with historical images from Google Earth. They used Near Infrared photography to capture images, and NDVI (Normalised Difference Vegetation Index) image processing in their analysis. Below you can see that they have compared data of Saudi Arabia from 1987 to 2023, showing increasing levels of vegetation grown in attempts to restore degraded land.

Team Barrande from the Czech Republic trained AI models on images they gathered to identify topographical features of Earth. Their Mission Space Lab program used the Astro Pi computer’s machine learning dongle to train one AI model in real time. Later, the team also used the collected images to train another model back on Earth. Comparing the outputs of the two models, the team could tell how well the models had identified different topographical features. The below selection shows an image the team’s experiment captured on the left, the same image after processing by the AI model trained on the Astro Pi computer in the middle, and the image processed by the AI model trained on Earth.

Team DAHspace from Portugal measured the intensity of the Earth’s magnetic field along the orbit path of the ISS. Using the magnetometer on the Astro Pi, their experiment recorded data allowing the team to track changes of intensity. The team mapped this data to the ISS’s coordinates, showing the difference in the Earth’s magnetic field between the North Pole (points 1 and 2 on the chart below) and the South Pole (points 3 and 4).

And the winning teams are…

We and our collaborators at ESA Education have been busy reviewing all of the reports to assess the scientific merit, use of the Astro Pi hardware, experiment design, and data analysis. The ten winning teams come from schools and coding clubs in 11 countries. We are sending each team some cool space swag to recognise their achievement. 

Winning teams

Team	Experiment theme	Based at	Country
Magnet47	Life on Earth	O’Neill CVI	Canada
Aretusa	Life on Earth	Liceo Da Vinci Floridia	Italy
ASaether	Life on Earth	“Andrei Saguna” National College	Romania
Barrande	Life on Earth	Gymnázium Joachima Barranda Beroun	Czech Republic
Escapers	Life in space	Code Club	Canada
Futura	Life in space	Scuola Svizzera Milano	Italy
StMarks	Life on Earth	St Mark’s Church of England School	United Kingdom
DAHspace	Life on Earth	EB 2,3 D. Afonso Henriques	Portugal
T5Clouds	Life on Earth	Dominican College	Ireland
PiNuts	Life in space	TEKNISK GYMNASIUM, Skanderborg	Denmark

You can click on a team name to read the team’s experiment report. 

Highly commended teams

Along with the winning teams, we would like to commend the following teams for their experiments:

Team	Experiment theme	Based at	Country
Parsec	Life on Earth	Liceo Da Vinci Pascoli Gallarate	Italy
Celeste	Life on Earth	International School of Florence	Italy
LionTech	Life on Earth	Colegiul Național ”Mihai Eminescu”	Romania
OHSpace	Life in Space	Oxford High School	United Kingdom
Magneto	Life on Earth	The American School of The Hague	Netherlands
GreenEye	Life on Earth	ROBOTONIO	Greece
Primus	Life on Earth	Independent coding club	Germany

You can click on a team name to read the team’s experiment report. 

All of the teams whose Mission Space Lab programs ran on the ISS will receive a certificate signed by ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. The winning and highly commended teams will also be invited to a live video chat with an ESA astronaut in the autumn.

Congratulations to all 2022/23 participants

Huge congratulations to every team that participated in Astro Pi Mission Space Lab. We hope you found it fun and inspiring to take part. 

A big thank you to everyone who has been involved in the European Astro Pi Challenge this year. An amazing 24,850 young people from 29 countries had their programs run in space this year. We can’t wait to do it all again starting in September.

And it’s not just us saying thanks and well done — here’s a special message from ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer:

Looking forward to the next Astro Pi Challenge

On 18 September 2023, we’ll launch the European Astro Pi Challenge for 2023/24. Mission Zero will open in September, and we’ll announce exciting news about Mission Space Lab in September too.

If you know a young person who might be interested in the Astro Pi Challenge, sign up for the newsletter on astro-pi.org and follow the Astro Pi Twitter account for all the latest announcements about how you can support them to take the unique opportunity to write code to run in space.