Two of the recently launched Raspberry Pi units for a mission to the International Space Station have just been powered on as part of phase two of the European Astro Pi challenge, which focuses on education. These new space-hardened Raspberry Pi units, called Astro Pi, embarked in September aboard a Dragon Cargo capsule mounted on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
These units are part of a project led by the European Space Agency (ESA) for the Earth-focused Mission Zero and Mission Space Lab missions. The first allows young Python programmers to take humidity measurements on board the ISS while the second allows students to perform various science experiments on the space station using its sensors.
These AstroPi boards, made up of a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 8 GB of memory, include a high-quality Raspberry Pi camera, one of Google’s Coral machine learning accelerators, a color and light sensor, as well as a a passive infrared sensor.
Apprentice developers to play!
Matthias Maurer, a member of ESA Expedition 66, a German materials scientist and engineer, installed the Astro Pi units this month, NASA explains. The new units are set to digitally replace the pair of Astro Pi “Ed and Izzy”, which have been on board the ISS since 2015, when the first Astro Pi Challenge was launched by the British ESA astronaut. Tim Peake.
The units were powered through a Griffin power adapter connected to an ISS AC power inverter, or through the USB port of an ISS crew laptop, and operate without a keyboard, monitor, or mouse . They are configured to begin treatment without crew interaction and are connected to the common station’s LAN network by an Ethernet cable, according to NASA.
The new Astro Pi units have not yet been named and that task is left to the young people who participate in Mission Zero, says the Raspberry Pi company. Students vote to choose the name of a European scientist who should be given to the units. .
Amazing experiences to come?
“We look forward to seeing the amazing experiments the space lab teams for this year’s Astro Pi mission will perform on the new hardware, and what they will discover about life on Earth and in space,” said Olympia. Brown from Raspberry Pi.
Astro Pi units had to pass ESA and NASA’s Safety Gate process, which includes vibration testing to ensure they can withstand launch conditions; a thermal test to ensure that the operating temperature of the device does not exceed 45 degrees Celsius and a test for sharp edges for the safety of the crew; electromagnetic emissions and susceptibility testing; and energy consumption tests.
ESA selected 502 teams from among the 800 teams that applied for the second phase of the Space Lab Mission. The selected teams received an Astro Pi hardware kit from ESA to help them write programs for their experiments.
Source: ZDNet.com