The Raspberry Pi Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports educational projects about the Raspberry Pi computer, has detailed how its tiny hardware has been used to run thousands of programs written by young students on the International Space Station (ISS).
The International Space Station operates in low Earth orbit and is supported by NASA and space agencies in Russia, Japan, Europe and Canada, and serves as a scientific research laboratory. The Raspberry Pi is, of course, a very popular single-board computer, which in this case was bundled into a space-friendly package called the Astro Pi.
Young people are invited to write programs for Astro Pi as part of the European Challenge Astro Pi for 2020-2021, which included two components called Mission Zero and Mission Space Lab. A total of 9,408 programs were developed to run on two Raspberry Pi computers on the International Space Station, Astro Pi “Izzy” and Astro Pi “Ed”, each running for 30 seconds.
space issue
The mission space lab It was run by the European Space Agency (ESA) and was open to small teams of people aged 19 or younger. Successful participants received an Astro Pi kit, which included a Raspberry Pi (RPi) 3B Model B, an RPi Sense HAT, an RPi camera module, storage cards, and cables to connect to the monitors. Using the Sense HAT’s LED matrix, software can display measurements and messages to astronauts.
There are two Astro Pi computers, located in the European Space Agency’s Columbus module on the International Space Station. Astro Pi computers are equipped with sensors for temperature, humidity, pressure, accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetic sensor.
Astro Pi Ed is designed to conduct experiments on life in space. On the other hand, Izzy is designed to conduct experiments on life on Earth. Eazy looks at the ground and has an infrared camera, which passes blue and near-infrared light to provide an image of the plants on the ground.
The Astro Pi project started in September 2020 and the best experiments were published on the International Space Station last April. Currently, teams that submitted successful proposals will receive data from their experiments from the International Space Station to analyze and draft the final reports.
If Ed and Izzy were just two small, solid computers aboard a reasonably large space station, even one compact computer could handle the problems of chaos. Normally, the International Space Station can only accommodate about seven crew members, but sometimes it is required to accommodate more, which creates problems.
On the other hand, “crew shocks” are more likely to occur, meaning that the USB cable connecting the Astro Pi to the power supply could accidentally break because an astronaut crashes into it in mid-air. “Area confined by the Columbus unit”, Claire Geffen, Astro Pi Program Manager at Raspberry Pi Foundations, explains.
And this time, the situation prompted one of the crew members to request permission to cover the Astro Pi Ed LED screen during “night”! why ? The astronaut was lying right in front of Ed, and the light from the screen made it hard to sleep! This shows that even in space, it’s best to avoid bright light if you need a good night’s sleep.”
Source : “ZDNet.com”
