Today\u27s rapid progress in space exploration leads to a high impact on our society. Especially young people are highly affected by this fascination. Despite this large pool of curious pupils, it remains challenging to find entry points into space and aeronautic-related careers for them. Often, these topics seem to be out of reach for most pupils. Educational programs like AstroPi (offered by ESA) or High School Aerospace Scholars (offered by NASA) target this issue. However, those projects never get into contact with actual outer space and remain mostly theoretical. The goal of the mission SpaceTeamSat1 and the CubeSat with the same name, is to provide an entry point to pupils, by giving them the opportunity to participate in a space mission.
With SpaceTeamSat1, the TU Wien Space Team develops a 1U CubeSat platform from scratch and operates it in low earth orbit at an approximate altitude of 500 km. It shall allow pupils of secondary schools, aged between 15 and 19 to run their own code on a Raspberry Pi payload in space. The mentioned payload offers a variety of sensors and cameras, which allows the execution of a broad range of experiments. Participating pupils and teams formed from them will be supervised by their teachers on a regular basis. In order to teach common industry practices and maximize the chances of a successful mission, the TU Wien Space Team will offer additional guidance in the form of documentation, reviews, and get-togethers. The highlight of the mission will be a coding challenge, where teams of pupils will compete against each other over the most successful in-orbit experiment according to inventiveness, project management, and code quality. These tasks are divided into different levels, beginning at entry-level tasks, such as calculating the rotation rate or investigating the thermal behavior of the CubeSat. More advanced tasks may include taking pictures of the Earth or Moon.
At the moment, SpaceTeamSat1 is in its prototyping phase and is planned to be launched in 2024. Complementary to that, a preliminary school outreach has begun, and a hand-selected group of secondary-level schools has been accepted to join as pilot participants. This allows for fine-tuning of the offered educational program and reveals drawbacks that can be targeted before the official start of the CubeSat mission. Additionally, the educational mission is evaluated and developed in cooperation with ESERO Austria. To our knowledge, the TU Wien Space Team is the only organization that offers such a mission so far. Since the know-how and technology that is produced in the course of the SpaceTeamSat1 mission is supposed to be open source, we are able to share insights on the difficulties that have been faced – or are expected – when proposing extracurricular activities to schools and pupils
