ND Students Designing Experiment for International Space Station

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The Astro Pi is a small computer designed for use on the International Space Station that can measure environmental conditions inside the space station, detect its movement through space, pick up the Earth’s magnetic field, and take pictures.

The European Space Agency has an annual science and coding competition where student-written code is run on the International Space Station. Students are to design their own experiment making use of the Astro Pi.

ND students Samantha Arcilla, Isaac Gill and Marco Gomez proposed an experiment to assess the impact humans are having on Earth’s atmosphere by taking pictures of the Aurora Borealis and analyzing them to determine the pollution levels in the atmosphere.

Their proposal was accepted by the ESA and they are now working on their experiment design in the hopes that it will be selected to run on the ISS in February.