Telling jokes to Astronauts on the Space Station with a Raspberry Pi!

We decided to brighten up the daily routine of the astronauts on the International Space Station today by telling them a joke and measuring the humidity for them, here’s how we did it!

My son (like many 9 year olds!) is space obsessed, and like myself he’s interested in almost anything tech, so this is a project we really wanted to get involved with. When we spotted the chance to learn some code AND run it up in Space Station we knew we had to have a go!

Astro Pi is a project run by Raspberry Pi and involves a Raspberry Pi in a special casing designed for conditions in space, this one is sat on board the International Space Station and is wearing a Sense HAT. The Sense HAT allows the Raspberry Pi to detect humidity, temperature, pressure and orientation.

Here you can see it in action:

The Mission Zero project allows teams of students under 14 years (with the help of a parent/teacher or mentor) to learn a little bit of Python using an emulator to run it in their web browser to test and refine it, before submitting it to be run on the International Space Station!

There was also a project for students under 19 years to run a science experiment over 6 months using the system.

Here you can see Thomas Pesquet launching the European Astro Pi Challenge:

We decided to tell the astronauts our favourite space joke as well as a little bit of pixel art, as well as report the humidity aboard the ISS to them.

You can see our code here: https://trinket.io/python/3d7220f03d

We couldn’t not include our favourite space joke here:

What do astronauts eat out of?

Satellite Dishes!!

It’s a simple step by step process, taking around an hour for anyone that wants to run it with their children or school class and requires no previous coding knowledge, but you’ll have to be quick – closing date for submissions is March 19th 2021

So long as your code runs error free and meets the guidelines it is guaranteed to run on the space station! We’re eagerly awaiting our certificate to say our code has run, and where the ISS was when it ran!!

If you have a go, let us know in the comments as we’d love to see what you sent to space!