The Raspberry Pi mini-computer has allowed students and others to get experience in programming and building electronics. Amateur astrophotographers also use the small computers to automate their telescopes. And ESA’s AstroPi project recently sent one of them into space to the International Space Station. ESA put together a competition to get student experiments to run on the in-space hardware, and the program’s first results are out.

All of the student experiments used the same hardware, called the Sense Hat. The students from a high school in Portugal programmed the AstroPi for magnetic field research. The students got data from about three hours of International Space Station (ISS) orbits and were able to roughly map the whole Earth’s magnetic field. In their paper published in the American Journal of Physics, they compared their ISS results to a professional network of satellites and ground stations that does a survey every 5 years. This survey, the International Geomagnetic Reference Network, was last done in 2020.

And the students’ results were close to the professionals’, with a fixed variation likely caused by the local field of the station’s electronics. The students tried again with fifteen more orbits of data and got better results.

According to the paper, the student project could be repeated on the ground. It doesn’t even need to use the Pi platform but could be done with smartphones. Faculty mentor Nuno Barros e Sá said: Taking measurements around the globe and sharing data via the internet or social media would make for an interesting science project that could connect students in different countries.

More Information

High school students measure Earth’s magnetic field from ISS (EurekAlert)

“Modelling the Earth’s magnetic field,” Nuno Barros e Sá and Miguel Cymbron, 2022 May 23, American Journal of Physics