High-school students in space

WHILE MANY YOUNG DREAMS feature adventures into space, Jessica Bishop and Sashenka Justin have already gained a place on the International Space Station.

As Year 11 students at Avila College in the Melbourne suburb of Mount Waverley, the pair led a science project that involved programming a compact single-board computer called a Raspberry Pi, having it blasted up to the ISS aboard a Spacex rocket, and then analysing the data it gathered and transmitted back to Earth.

Assisted by three Year 9 students – Beatrice Van Rest, Amarasi Wasalatilake and Michaela Williams – Bishop and Justin’s experiments were part of Cuberider, a spaceeducation program for school science students.

“It’s interesting to know how everything works in the physical world,” Justin says. “To find out yourself instead of being told by a teacher in a classroom is, I think, way cooler and way more fun.”

The Raspberry Pi came attached to several sensors. It was up to the team to devise their own experiment.

“We wanted to investigate the acceleration and rotation of the ISS, so we programmed the actual device ourselves from the beginning,” Bishop says.

Justin adds: “We chose to use the gyroscope and the accelerometer. We really wanted to investigate the orbits of the ISS, because orbits are a bit of a mythical thing that none of us understand.

“We found out that the ISS is actually in a constant state of falling around the Earth, and it’s the gravity and inertia that’s keeping it that way.”

Both are keen to pursue science-based careers after completing high school: Justin is keen to study engineering, while Bishop fancies computer science. For now, their ISS experiment represents a pretty good combination of both.

“It’s not like we can launch our own satellite,” Bishop jokes. “That’s for next year.”