Mission Space Lab Mentor Guide
Welcome to the European Astro Pi Challenge 2026/27: Mission Space Lab. This mentor guide provides information and tips to help you make sure your teams successfully participate.
Mission Space Lab invites young people to run their own code on the International Space Station (ISS), giving them an unforgettable opportunity to conduct real space science in space.
First, we’d like to give a big shout-out to all Mission Space Lab mentors. Thank you for sharing your time, knowledge, and enthusiasm to support and inspire the next generation of space scientists.
Before you start, please check the eligibility criteria.
No prior Astro Pi experience required
You do not need any previous experience with the European Astro Pi Challenge to take part in Mission Space Lab. We provide a number of helpful resources to support you and your team during the Mission.
This mentor guide provides instructions and information to help you take part in the Mission with your team, including technical support and debugging tips. We have also included some suggestions for how to organise your team, help them plan their work, and get everyone working together. If you have a larger team, this might be helpful to ensure everyone is able to contribute effectively.
You will learn more about other resources available to help you and your team later in this guide.
Mission resources and preparation
We provide lots of resources for Mission Space Lab mentors and teams.
The Mission Space Lab creator guide introduces some of the coding skills your team may need to produce their Python program. It includes guidance to help teams review, refine, and test their programs.
The Mission Space Lab rulebook contains the specification that the program must meet to be considered for running on the ISS.
Your team will have the opportunity to come up with ideas for what they would like to investigate. They will then work out how to write the code they need. With so many ideas to investigate, there is no complete guide on how to create a program that fits their exact design. However, we do provide some working examples of projects that your teams can follow and customise.
What will your team investigate?
The Astro Pi computers offer lots of possibilities for different science projects. To illustrate what's possible, here are a few selected examples of projects that Mission Space Lab teams designed in the past:
Please note: These projects had a program run time of 3 hours. Your team’s program must run within 10 minutes.
We encourage mentors to support teams in coming up with their own experiment design. You can find historical images in our collection on Flickr to give your team a sense of what you can expect to capture, and you can find further resources about the Astro Pi hardware in stage 2 of this guide.
Answers to many questions teams may have can probably be found by searching online. You should encourage your team to use a research-based approach whenever they get stuck. We will also be running two scheduled online webinars where you can ask the Astro Pi Mission Control any questions you have, book a support call with us directly [here](add calendar link), or email us at [email protected]. Don’t hesitate to contact us — we would love to hear from and support you.
Teacher training and other educational activities related to Astro Pi may be organised in your country by the European Space Education Resource Office (ESERO). You can find your national ESERO on this page.
To complete Mission Space Lab, teams will need:
A computer with an internet connection
A Python editor (we recommend Thonny)
Participation in Mission Space Lab requires around 3 to 10 hours of contact/project time. To make the best use of that time, we recommend making sure the computers your team will be using have everything installed before you start.
We suggest running the activity as a series of informal sessions that take teams through the design thinking process (you can find out more about this in stage 3 in this guide). The stages in this guide do not need to be completed in a single session, lesson, or period.
Safeguarding
Whether you run your activities in a school, club, or public place, it’s important that you provide a safe space for young people and are aware of what to do if you have any concerns for their welfare.
Make sure you’re familiar with the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s safeguarding policy and our safeguarding resources. If you work directly with children, young people, and vulnerable adults, and you have any concerns for their welfare, you should report them to us immediately.
It is recommended to complete this 30-minute interactive safeguarding training, which will help you create a safe learning environment for all young people you engage with.
Do a quick check of the projects your group or teams are working on. If you plan to submit them as part of a challenge, then please note that we will reject any projects that depict realistic violence towards people or animals, nudity, sexual posturing, obscenities, or offensive or discriminatory language.
Please check the submission guidelines and eligibility criteria for the challenge.
If you are not sure how to report a safeguarding incident, take a look at our short guide on how to deal with safeguarding concerns.
Exactly what does the program need to do?
Your team will need to take data in real time from the sensors and/or camera on an Astro Pi computer and log this data to file. Their program will run for 10 minutes, so they may choose to take multiple measurements and compute an average or other statistical result. By the end of the 10-minute runtime, their program will need to terminate and write a file containing the data they captured, plus any other files their program outputs. Your team’s data and photos will be sent to you after their program has been deployed on the ISS. The full technical specifications and data limits are explained in the Mission Space Lab Rulebook, so make sure you and your team read it carefully.
