Mission Space Lab Mentor Guide

The aim of this stage is to spark wonder and curiosity among your team members. If you and/or your team are already familiar with the European Astro Pi Challenge, you can skip this stage and move on to stage 3, if you like. To help you introduce the Astro Pi Challenge and Mission Space Lab, you could use this slide deck.

There are lots of additional pWe provide a few different step-by-step guides focused on accessing the sensors and cameras on the Astro Pi computers, plus some specific experiments that your team may choose to do. Your team can include some of the code they develop from these in their final program submission. 

• Getting started with the Sense HAT project guide to learn more about how to take sensor readings using the Sense HAT.

• Getting started with the Camera Module project guide to learn more about how to use the camera. To take a photo of Earth from the ISS, you can use the Astro Pi's camera. 

• ‘Calculate the speed of the ISS using photos’: This project guide shows you how to calculate the ISS’s speed using static photos. Your team could use this as a starting point and modify their program to run on the ISS using real-time photos taken with the Astro Pi’s camera. 

• Use the NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index): Learn how to process visual light data to analyse plant health, vegetation density, and environmental features across the Earth's surface using this project guide.

• Sense HAT data logger: Log and organise your sensor data into a csv file to analyse while your program runs or at a later date. 

• Photo sequences taken using the Astro Pis on Flickr: Use historical images from previous Astro Pi teams to test and refine your programs.