Class may be out of session, but an experiment by three Ballenas Secondary students is still set to run on the International Space Station this month.
Victor Kamel, Yehia El Karsh and Spencer Bradbury spent months designing the experiment, part of an educational initiative by the European Space Agency and the Raspberry Pi Foundation to get young people excited about space.
The students hope their computer code will be able to detect small changes to the ISS’s orbit as it moves through the thin upper atmosphere of the earth. To do this, they will use sensors already on board the ISS. Once their data has been collected, it will be sent back for analysis.
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“It was amazing news when we received the email from our teacher. We put a lot of work into designing and writing the computer code to run the experiment. It’s nice to see that hard work pays off,” said Bradbury in a press release.
All three students are set to go to post-secondary in the fall.
“This is not the ideal way to finish the project or our school year, but we can make it work,” said Kamel, who had another experiment on the ISS last school year.
— NEWS staff, submitted