The winners of the European Astro Pi Challenge Mission Space Lab 2020-21

In Mission Space Lab, teams of young people aged 19 and younger create scientific experiments that run on the two Astro Pi computers on board the International Space Station. 

In the final phase of the Challenge, teams have to analyse the data captured during their experiment’s 3-hour runtime on the ISS and write a short final report highlighting their hypothesis, methods, results, and conclusions. 
 
From 154 final reports, the Astro Pi team has now chosen 10 winners and 5 highly commended entries that have each demonstrated great scientific merit and innovative use of the Astro Pi hardware. 

Our winning teams are… 
 
1. Atlantes from Niubit Coding Club in Spain who used a sonification process to convert data captured by the Astro Pi’s sensors into music, having been inspired by Commander Chris Hadfield’s performance of Space Oddity on the ISS in 2013. 
 
2. Mag-AZ from Escola Secundária Domingos Rebelo in Portugal who attempted to create an algorithm that could calculate the location of the magnetic poles of any planet or star by using the Astro Pi to map Earth’s magnetic fields. 
 
3. Zeus from Tudor Vianu National College of Computer Science in Romania who used photos of Earth captured by the Astro Pi camera, historical data sets, and machine learning to develop a weather forecast system that could predict meteorological phenomena on Earth. 
 
4. Mateii from Saint Sava National College in Romania who investigated the potential growth of Aspergillus and Penicillium mold on the ISS in comparison to on Earth using a simulation model and Astro Pi sensor readings from inside the Columbus module. 
 
5. Juno from Institut d'Altafulla in Spain who attempted to determine how much heat the astronauts on board the ISS experience by using temperature, pressure and humidity data captured by the Astro Pi and psychrometric calculations. 
 
6. SpaceRad from Centrum Nauki Keplera - Planetarium Wenus in Poland who investigated albedo (the proportion of light or radiation that is reflected by a surface) on Earth to evaluate the efficacy of using solar farms to combat climate change. 

7. Albedo from Lycée Albert Camus in France who also investigated albedo on Earth, using photos captured by the Astro Pi camera to classify cloud, land and sea coverage and analysing their corresponding albedo values. 

8. Magtrix from The Leys School in the United Kingdom who analysed whether geographical features of Earth such as mountains affect its magnetic field using the Astro Pi’s magnetometer, GPS data and photos of Earth captured by the Astro Pi. 
 
9. Mechabot from Robone Robotics Club in Germany who investigated how the Earth's magnetic field correlates with its climate, and how this affects near-Earth objects' behavior in low Earth orbit. 
 
10. Spacepi2 from Zanneio Model High School in Greece investigated urbanization on Earth by comparing photos captured by the Astro Pi with historical data using an automated photo classification program they created and NDVI analysis. 

Highly commended teams 

1. Bergson from Lycée Henri-Bergson Paris in France who built an AI model predicting NO2 pollution levels on Earth using NDVI analysis of photos taken by the Astro Pi camera. 

2. LionTech from "Mihai Eminescu" National College, Oradea în Romania who attempted to measure the velocity of the ISS in orbit, and also created an algorithm to detect smoke, pollution and types of cloud coverage in the images they captured. 

3. RosSpace from Ceo Boecillo in Spain who are the third team in our list to have investigated Earth’s albedo levels in relation to global warming using photo analysis. A popular theme this year! 

4. Jupiter from Institut d'Altafulla in Spain who looked at variations in the current surface area of water bodies on Earth compared to historical records as an indicator of climate change. 

And a special mention for: 

5. Ultrafly from Ultrafly Coding Club in Canada who were the youngest team to make the highly commended list this year, with an average age of 8. Their experiment explored whether the environmental variables on the ISS created allergy-friendly living conditions for the astronauts on board.

Every team who reached Phase 2 or further this year will be receiving participation certificates recognising their progress in the Challenge, and the Winners and Highly Commended teams will be receiving special certificates and an additional prize. 

Winners Webinar with ESA Astronaut Luca Parmitano

The prize for this year’s winners and highly commended teams is the chance to pose their questions to ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano during a live webinar to be held on 28 September at 11 a.m. CET! 
 
Instructions on how to submit questions to Luca will be sent to winning and highly commended team mentors shortly. 
 
This Q&A event for the finalists will conclude this year’s European Astro Pi Challenge. It’s been an incredible year for the Challenge, with 15,756 young people from 23 countries participating in either Mission Zero or Mission Space Lab.  
 
Everyone on the Raspberry Pi and ESA Education teams congratulates this year’s participants for their efforts, especially given the obstacles many teams have had to overcome this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.  

Thank you to everyone who took part, we hope you found it as fun as we did! 
 
 

We’ll be back before you know it!

While this year’s Astro Pi Challenge is coming to an end, Mission Zero and Mission Space Lab will return in September! 
 
We’d like to invite teachers, educators, club leaders and all young people who love coding and space science to follow our updates on astro-pi.org and our twitter account to make sure you don’t miss any announcements. We can’t wait to welcome you back for the next European Astro Pi Challenge!