Mission Space Lab Mentor Guide
Stage 4 - Submission
The last stage is the submission process for Mission Space Lab, where you send us your team’s final program for evaluation and testing by our panel of specialists. Teams whose programs are awarded flight status will be invited to attend a special Astro Pi Mission Space Lab event with an ESA astronaut, hosted by the Raspberry Pi Foundation and ESA.
Please submit your teams’ programs by 09:00 CET 24 February 2025.
This is when you will need the email that you will have received when you registered your team in stage 1. The email has a unique link through which you can submit your team’s finished and tested program.
Your team’s program should be saved as a file called main.py and added to a zip file along with any other files that your team’s solution uses. The submission form will only accept zip files.
The form also has a reminder of the requirements that your team’s program must meet. Take some time to review these before you hit the ‘Submit’ button. Every year there are some teams that miss out on the opportunity to have their programs run in space because they have not met one of these criteria.
There are no other set rules that will be used to determine which entries are selected to run on the ISS: they will all be assessed compared to each other. However, there are some factors that will increase the chances of your team’s program being selected:
It must run without errors and conform to the rules.
It should be well documented and easy to understand. We recommend including plenty of in-line comments.
Any attempts to ‘fix’ the result will not be looked on favourably, so discourage your team from adding a sneaky line of code that rejects any answer that does not match or come close to the accepted value, for example.
Creative solutions to the problem, even if they are experimental, are more likely to be selected compared to solutions that are duplicates of example code.
The age of participants will be considered, so teams of younger participants will not be expected to have written as complex programs as teams of older participants.
Thank you for taking part in Mission Space Lab.
