Mission Space Lab is part of the European Astro Pi Challenge, an ESA Education project run with the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Teams of young people write a Python program that collects sensor data or photographs from the Raspberry Pi computers on board the International Space Station, and every eligible program gets a 10-minute slot running in orbit. It is free, and teams need no Raspberry Pi of their own: programs are written on any computer and tested online with the Astro Pi Replay Tool.

What you get:

• A 10-minute slot for your team's program to run on the Astro Pi computers aboard the ISS, if it passes testing and earns flight status
• Official certificates showing the exact time and geo-coordinates when your code ran in space
• Your own data set and images captured from orbit, to download, keep and analyse
• An invitation to a live virtual Q&A with a human spaceflight expert from the European Space Agency
• Free project guides, a creator guide and an online tool that simulates your program using real data from past missions

What you'll do:

• Choose your own space science question, or follow a ready-made project guide such as calculating the speed of the ISS or analysing vegetation on Earth
• Write a Python program that uses at least one Sense HAT sensor or the camera and saves the results to a file
• Test it in the online Astro Pi Replay Tool and check it against the program requirements, including stopping before 10 minutes
• Your mentor submits the finished program by 22 February 2027

Key dates:

• Registration and submissions open 14 September 2026
• Mentors submit programs by 22 February 2027 at 12:00 noon CET
• Teams told whether they earned flight status by the end of April 2027
• Programs run on the ISS April to May 2027
• Certificates, data and images sent May to June 2027

More information:

• Mission Space Lab rulebook: https://astro-pi.org/mission-space-lab/rulebook
• Eligibility criteria: https://astro-pi.org/mission-zero/eligibility
• Mentor guide: https://astro-pi.org/mission-space-lab/mentor-guide

• Aged 19 or younger at the time of submission
• A team of 2 to 6 young people; each participant can be in only one team
• Supervised by an adult mentor, such as a teacher, educator, parent, Scout leader, or Code Club or CoderDojo leader, who registers the team and submits the program
• Enrolled full-time in a primary or secondary school in an ESA Member State, Canada, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania or Slovakia, or a member of a Scout group, coding or after-school club, or certified home school in an ESA Member State, Canada, Latvia, Lithuania or Slovakia
• At least 50 percent of team members must be nationals of an ESA Member State, Canada, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania or Slovakia
• ESA Member States: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom
• Programs must be in English, written in Python 3.13 as main.py, and meet the rulebook's checklist