Image: Ars Electronica
26 student teams from all over Europe recently competed in Granada, Spain, for victory in the final of the CanSat competition of the European Space Agency (ESA). The young inventors had their self-made satellites in can format with them. Before the final, the participants had won preliminary rounds in their countries and bought their final tickets with a lot of creativity and technical expertise. The “WerndlExplorer” team from Austria stood at the launch pad and took the sensational first place. The six students from the Werndlpark Gymnasium and the HTL Steyr were unbeatable in the “Best Outreach” (best range) category and particularly impressed with the idea of real-time access to data during the flight phase of their satellite.
The jury was able to follow the mission’s success live in the open source program “Grafana” and via push notifications on their mobile phones. The “WerndlExplorer” team was also able to score with uniform branding for the media presence, the ground station and, of course, the CanSats themselves. “We are totally enthusiastic about this event. The atmosphere was very happy and comradely right from the start”, enthused the Steyr students. The members of the jury also found them to be friendly and helpful: “They took a lot of time for us and gave us one or two tips. These are very smart people and at the same time so friendly and genuinely interested.”
In a CanSat competition, the participants have to go through all the phases of a real space project: from the selection of the mission to the construction of a satellite (a CanSat) to the launch of the rocket and the scientific analysis of the data obtained.
Source: Nachrichten
