Have you ever wondered just how difficult it would be to design, build and launch your own satellite? Our intrepid team of five Akademeia High School students decided to give it a go (with a little support from the European Space Agency)!

Aleksy, Tymon, Maria, Henryk, and Mateusz spent months working away on their own satellite, dubbed ‘AirThief’. Its mission – to sample a mysterious microbiome of Earth’s atmosphere at over 2000 meters altitude and deliver any life discovered there safely back to the ground for further analysis in a sterile lab.

The design impressed the jury of the European Space Agency’s CanSat competition, allowing “AirThief” to launch the experiment as one of just five such capsules aboard a powerful sounding rocket in the summer of this year. The competition was fierce as over 50 teams took part in the selection process.

Congratulations!

If you wanted to learn more about the design – make sure to visit the team’s dedicated website: https://www.airthief.net/

You can also follow the latest developments on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Air-Thief-102207065045156