A competition for space-bound students resulted in a tiny, can-sized, Raspberry Pi-powered satellite. Rob Zwetsloot boldly takes a look at it.

What would you do if you had to create a satellite the size of a drinks can? The yearly CanSat competition for students in their teens asks this question, and many teams have answered — including LittleBlueDot.

“The challenge for students is to fit all the major subsystems found in a satellite, such as power, sensors, and a communication system, into this minimal volume,” the team tell us. They came third in the country for their final build. As the competition instructions explain, “After building their CanSat, teams will be invited to launch events across the UK to launch their CanSats on small rockets, with their CanSats returning to Earth using a parachute designed by the students. Teams are set a primary mission of measuring air pressure and air temperature during the CanSat’s descent, with data being transmitted to the students’ ground station.”

They also needed to design a secondary mission, which in the case of LittleBlueDot included taking photos of the ground below to map it. “The idea of mapping large areas, including foreign bodies, came up when we were discussing potential asteroid mining in the future,” the team say. “And also improving efficiency in agriculture, both fields where large benefits could be seen from mapping land cheaply.”

...read more at raspberrypi.com