Astro Pi
The programme that put Raspberry Pi computers and the Sense HAT on the International Space Station — and lets students run code on them.
What is Astro Pi?
Astro Pi is a joint programme between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the European Space Agency (ESA). It lets young people run their code on Raspberry Pi computers aboard the International Space Station. The Sense HAT is the primary piece of hardware they interact with — every mission is essentially "what interesting thing can you do with this board 400 km above the Earth?".
The two missions
- Mission Zero — a beginner-friendly path. Students write a short program (typically a Sense HAT LED animation with a personalised message) that is guaranteed to run on the ISS for a fixed time slot. No hardware required.
- Mission Space Lab — a full scientific experiment. Teams design an investigation, write code that runs for a longer window on the ISS, receive their data back and produce a report.
The Astro Pi units
The units on the ISS are Raspberry Pis inside a flight-certified aluminium case, running the Sense HAT plus additional cameras and sensors. Two upgraded units — nicknamed Ed and Izzy — have been on the station since 2021 and support higher-resolution imagery and machine-learning workloads.
Where Java fits
The official Astro Pi programme runs on Python, using the
sense-hat library. Java isn't part of the flight image, but the API surfaces are
equivalent — most Astro Pi projects can be prototyped and taught in Java on the ground with
Pi4J and the examples in this playground, then translated to Python before submission.