Astro Pi 2024-25: Another Stellar Year of Coding in Space Concludes!

We are thrilled to celebrate another incredible year of young people reaching for the stars with code, as the European Astro Pi Challenge 2024-25 draws to a close! Teams are now receiving their well-deserved certificates and data from the International Space Station (ISS). It's been a truly inspiring year, showcasing the phenomenal talent and dedication of young coders and scientists.

The European Astro Pi Challenge is an ESA Education project run in collaboration with the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It offers young people the amazing opportunity to conduct scientific investigations in space, by writing computer programs that run on Raspberry Pi computers on board the ISS.

There‘s much to celebrate from this year’s Astro Pi Challenge, so let’s take a look at some of the highlights for each of our inspiring Missions; Mission Zero, and Mission Space Lab.

Mission Zero - Inspiring coding, creativity and inclusion

Mission Zero reached more younger people than ever before in 2024-25, with 25,405 young people participating in 17,285 teams. An amazing 17,109 teams (25,210 young people) were successful in getting their programs to run on the ISS after passing the rigorous testing and moderation processes.

This year, 44% of Mission Zero participants identified as female, while 4% chose to self-describe, preferred not to say, or identified as other. This diverse gender representation in Mission Zero highlights the programme's commitment to inclusivity, and contrasts the typical gender distribution in Computing subjects, which often sees a 20:80 ratio of females to males.

Mission Space Lab - More teams have their code run in space

552 teams, consisting of 1,859 young people, participated in Mission Space Lab this year. They created programs to calculate the speed of the ISS in orbit using sensor and camera data collected from the Astro Pi computers. Notably, 309 Mission Space Lab teams (73 more teams than in 2023-24) successfully ran their code on the ISS and are now analysing the data they collected. A total of 1,084 young people received unique data sets from space and certificates!

Running a program in space is very different to testing it on the ground, so teams were eager to see how their programs performed and how accurate the final output was. A scatter graph below shows the teams’ estimates produced by their programs. For comparison, the actual speed the ISS is travelling is approximately 7.67 kilometres per second.

Inspiration and impactful

A regular highlight of the Astro Pi Challenge is the feedback we receive from the young people and mentors participating each year. Their inspiring messages of learning and growth, along with thoughtful suggestions for improvement, provide us with valuable insights into their experience. Here are a few quotes from the community who took part this year:

Mission Zero Mentor quote: “Having their programs run in space really motivated them to take part because it was an exciting reward and something they wanted to talk about with their friends.”

Parent of Mission Zero participant quote: “I was completely inexperienced in coding Python but easily managed to help my 7-year old to write the code”

Conclusion

Another year of the European Astro Pi Challenge concludes on a strong note. We've engaged thousands of young people and mentors in the world of space and programming, connected with participants in a range of settings, and observed encouraging trends throughout the project. And to top it off, our operations aboard on the International Space Station went smoothly, delivering a wealth of data to teams across Europe!

None of it would be possible without the tireless efforts of the teachers, mentors and educators who help to run Astro Pi in their communities. From everyone here at Astro Pi Mission Control, thank you!

If you’d like to tell us how we can provide more support for you running Astro Pi, please email contact@astro-pi.org

We’ll be back for more stellar space adventures in coding in September 2025. See you in the next edition of the European Astro Pi Challenge!