Teams from Hungary, Latvia, Slovenia and Switzerland selected to participate in the 2021 Virtual European CanSat Competition
The ESA Education team is delighted to announce that the following teams from Hungary, Latvia, Slovenia and Switzerland have been selected to participate in the 2021 European CanSat Competition:
PremSat, Hungary
The team from Premontrei Szent Norbert Gimnázium aims to measure how the concentration of toxic components of the air vary along the height of the atmosphere. Determination of the distribution of the airborne dust concentration in the atmosphere is another aim of this team’s mission.
LatSat, Latvia
The team from Engineering High School of Riga Technical University plans to analyze visual data to count objects in the area. If successful, these findings have the potential to be used for land surveying, animal population tracking or traffic management purposes.
Vegasat, Slovenia
The team from Elektrotehniško-računalniška strokovna šola in gimnazija Ljubljana wants to monitor the growth of electron crystals in microgravity and compare this to electron crystal growth on Earth. The team will use a spectrometer to analyze and monitor the growth of electron crystals in microgravity.
SWISSCAN, Switzerland
The team from Scuola D’Arti e Mestieri wants to expand on the primary mission of temperature and air pressure measurements by also measuring air humidity and wind speed/direction. They wish to chemically characterise the atmosphere by collecting air samples for post-flight analysis. This procedure, if successful, will allow them to study the “vertical profile” of the air quality, something that is impossible to achieve with ground-based stations.
These four teams will participate alongside the winners from ESA Member States that have a National Competition as well as Malta who are guest competitors. The European CanSat Competition will be held virtually in June 2021.
Each of the teams will spend the months leading up to the European CanSat launch campaign building and testing their CanSat and refining all their fantastic scientific ideas. ESA Education has a series of classroom resources available to aid the CanSat teams throughout the competition.
The location of the 2021 European CanSat Competition and more details about the structure of the campaign and how it will run will be announced in the coming months.