Amazing science from the winners of Astro Pi Mission Space Lab 2019–20

The team at Raspberry Pi and our partner ESA Education are pleased to announce the winning and highly commended Mission Space Lab teams of the 2019–20 European Astro Pi Challenge!

Mission Space Lab sees teams of young people across Europe design, create, and deploy experiments running on Astro Pi computers aboard the International Space Station. Their final task: analysing the experiments’ results and sending us scientific reports highlighting their methods, results, and conclusions.

One of the Astro Pi computers aboard the International Space Station

The science teams performed was truly impressive, and the reports teams sent us were of outstanding quality. A special round of applause to the teams for making the effort to coordinate writing their reports socially distant!

The Astro Pi jury has now selected the ten winning teams, as well as eight highly commended teams:

And our winners are…

Vidhya’s code from the UK aimed to answer the question of how a compass works on the ISS, using the Astro Pi computer’s magnetometer and data from the World Magnetic Model (WMM).

Unknown from Externato Cooperativo da Benedita, Portugal, aptly investigated whether influenza is transmissible on a spacecraft such as the ISS, using the Astro Pi hardware alongside a deep literature review.

Space Wombats from Institut d’Altafulla, Spain, used normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) analysis to identify burn scars from forest fires. They even managed to get results over Chernobyl!

Liberté from Catmose College, UK, set out to prove the Coriolis Effect by using Sobel filtering methods to identify the movement and direction of clouds.

Pardubice Pi from SPŠE a VOŠ Pardubice, Czech Republic, found areas of enormous vegetation loss by performing NDVI analysis on images taken from the Astro Pi and comparing this with historic images of the location.

NDVI conversion image by Pardubice Pi team

Reforesting Entrepreneurs from Canterbury School of Gran Canaria, Spain, want to help solve the climate crisis by using NDVI analysis to identify locations where reforestation is possible.

1G5-Boys from Lycée Raynouard, France, innovatively conducted spectral analysis using Fast Fourier Transforms to study low-frequency vibrations of the ISS.

Cloud4 from Escola Secundária de Maria, Portugal, masterfully used a simplified static model and Fourier Analysis to detect atmospheric gravity waves (AGWs).

Cloud Wizzards from Primary School no. 48, Poland, scanned the sky to determine what percentage of the seas and oceans are covered by clouds.

Aguere Team 1 from IES Marina Cebrián, Spain, probed the behaviour of the magnetic field, acceleration, and temperature on the ISS by investigating disturbances, variations with latitude, and temporal changes.

Highly commended teams

Creative Coders, from the UK, decided to see how much of the Earth’s water is stored in clouds by analysing the pixels of each image of Earth their experiment collected.

Astro Jaslo from I Liceum Ogólnokształcące króla Stanisława Leszczyńskiego w Jaśle, Poland, used Reimann geometry to determine the angle between light from the sun that is perpendicular to the Astro Pi camera, and the line segment from the ISS to Earth’s centre.

Jesto from S.M.S Arduino I.C.Ivrea1, Italy, used a multitude of the Astro Pi computers’ capabilities to study NDVI, magnetic fields, and aerosol mapping.

BLOOMERS from Tudor Vianu National Highschool of Computer Science, Romania, investigated how algae blooms are affected by eutrophication in polluted areas.

AstroLorenzini from Liceo Statale C. Lorenzini, Italy used Kepler’s third law to determine the eccentricity, apogee, perigee, and mean tangential velocity of the ISS.

Photo of Italy, Calabria and Sicilia (notice volcano Etna on the top right-hand corner) captured by the AstroLorenzi team

EasyPeasyCoding Verdala FutureAstronauts from Verdala International School & EasyPeasyCoding, Malta, utilised machine learning to differentiate between cloud types.

BHTeamEL from Branksome Hall, Canada, processed images using Y of YCbCr colour mode data to investigate the relationship between cloud type and luminescence.

Space Kludgers from Technology Club of Thrace, STETH, Greece, identified how atmospheric emissions correlate to population density, as well as using NDVI, ECCAD, and SEDAC to analyse the correlation of vegetation health and abundance with anthropogenic emissions.

The teams get a Q&A with astronaut Luca Parmitano

The prize for the winners and highly commended teams is the chance to pose their questions to ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano! The teams have been asked to record a question on video, which Luca will answer during a live stream on 3 September.

ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano aboard the International Space Station

This Q&A event for the finalists will conclude this year’s European Astro Pi Challenge. Everyone on the Raspberry Pi and ESA Education teams congratulates this year’s participants on all their efforts.

It’s been a phenomenal year for the Astro Pi challenge: team performed some great science, and across Mission Space Lab and Mission Zero, an astronomical 16998 young people took part, from all ESA member states as well as Slovenia, Canada, and Malta.

Congratulations to everyone who took part!

Get excited for your next challenge!

This year’s European Astro Pi Challenge is almost over, and the next edition is just around the corner!

Compilation of photographs of Earth taken by an Astro Pi computer

So we invite school teachers, educators, students, and all young people who love coding and space science to join us from September onwards.

Follow our updates on astro-pi.org and social media to make sure you don’t miss any announcements. We will see you for next year’s European Astro Pi Challenge!

The post Amazing science from the winners of Astro Pi Mission Space Lab 2019–20 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

from Raspberry Pi https://ift.tt/3f7eFnG

Monitor systemd journals via email

Modern Linux systems often use systemd as their init system and manager for jobs and many other functions. Services managed by systemd generally send their output (of all forms: warnings, errors, informational messages, and more) to the systemd journal, not to traditional logging systems like syslog.

read more

from Opensource.com https://ift.tt/39FmmjH

10 cheat sheets for Linux sysadmins

When you're a systems administrator, you don't just have one job; you have ALL the jobs, and often each one is on-demand with little to no warning. Unless you do a task every day, you may not always have all the commands and options you need in mind when you need them. And that's why I love cheat sheets.

Cheat sheets help you avoid silly mistakes, they keep you from having to look through pages of documentation, and they keep you moving efficiently through your tasks. I've selected my favorite 10 cheat sheets for any sysadmin, regardless of experience level.

read more

from Opensource.com https://ift.tt/2BGjGG0

4 ways I contribute to open source as a Linux systems administrator

I recently participated in The Linux Foundation Open Source Summit North America, held virtually June 29-July 2, 2020. In the course of that event, I had the opportunity to speak with a fellow attendee about my career in Linux systems administration and how it had led me to a career focused on open source. Specifically, he asked, how does a systems administrator who doesn't do a lot of coding participate in open source projects?

That's a great question!

read more

from Opensource.com https://ift.tt/3f95NxX

15-inch touch panel PC builds on Raspberry Pi CM3

Comfile’s 15-inch “ComfilePi CPi-A150WR” touch-panel computer is built around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 and offers an IP65 protected, 1024 x 768 resistive touchscreen pus USB, LAN, serial, and 22x GPIO. Comfile Technology has added to its line of ComfilePi touch panel computers built around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 (CM3). The new […]

from LinuxGizmos.com https://ift.tt/308m1mG

Carrier board duo support Toradex’s Verdin modules

Linear Computing has posted specs for two carrier boards with optional enclosures that support Toradex’s Linux-driven i.MX8M Mini and Nano based Verdin modules: a general purpose “VSC-4436” and a “VBB-4449” DAQ controller. While reporting this week on Toradex’s Dahlia carrier board for its Verdin modules, we saw that Ontario-based Linear Computing, Inc. (LCI) had posted […]

from LinuxGizmos.com https://ift.tt/3ggn1L2

Power GaN and SiC Enter a New Era

Power electronics has taken an interesting road with the adoption of GaN and SiC. Yole Développement (Yole) estimated a general view of these wide bandgap materials. While silicon is still dominating the market, GaN and SiC devices are already more efficient solutions in some applications. From a development standpoint, SiC research  is focused on SiC wafer quality on larger diameters and power module development. In the GaN field, the main trends are on GaN device integration — either system-in-package or system-on-chip solutions.

Silicon carbide
Ezgi Dogmus, technology & market analyst at Yole, described the progress in wafer sizes used in processing SiC circuitry.“ We have seen a transition from four inches to six inches in the last couple of years. And now more and more device manufacturers are working on six inches. What we understand is that today the high quality six-inch wafers are still difficult to produce. This is still challenging in terms of substrate growth and also preparation, and this will directly affect the yield that you have in the next processes. So the idea for the device manufacturers is to start with good material from the beginning to the end, in order to really maximize their yield and also, of course, economize in terms of cost of their product,” Dogmus said.

She continued, “We have seen lots of investment from leading players such as Cree, II-VI and Sicrystal and also Chinese players. There has been a lot of involvement from many players in this area. Multiple-years supply agreements have been signed between substrate suppliers Cree/Wolfspeed and SiCrystal and device manufacturers such as Infineon and ST Microelectronics.”

ON Semi similarly entered a long term deal with a fab to demonstrate it can support high-volume markets. Most of these deals were signed between 2018 and 2019.

Figure 1: Power SiC long-term evolution. Click to enlarge the image. (Source: Yole)

“We know that ST has a partnership with Tesla for the silicon carbide main inverter, so it really represents the highest volume in the silicon carbide market today. And we also see Infineon and ON semi in the race, so they’re also really targeting industrial and automotive applications,” said Dogmus.

“ON Semi is also developing its internal silicon carbide substrates. They have also had an agreement with GTAT for the silicon carbide crystal supplies. It is essential to have high quality for them and also vertically integrate them into the supply chain and have the overall control on their material,” Dogmus said.

She continued, “We think that, looking into the future, the players will focus  more and more on the module part because we are going to target applications such as the high power applications, such as the main inverter and the charging infrastructure, and all these applications will also require high power modules.”

Gallium nitride
In the power GaN industry, one of the main trends has been to collaborate with established foundries such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), X-Fab, or Episil Technologies.

Power GaN ICs are sold largely into the consumer electronics market, mainly for fast chargers. And we have seen a lot of integration for these devices. “It’s an obvious technological trend for the consumer market. So, we have GaN system-in-package and GaN system-on-chip. These are the main solutions that are being offered now for fast chargers,” said Ahmed Ben Slimane, technology & market analyst at Yole.

Figure 2: Power GaN long-term evolution. Click to enlarge the image (Source: Yole)

He continued, “The requirement for fast charger, for example, is power density and efficiency. So, we have to really squeeze the system in this form factor and to lower the price per power. We have seen a big adoption for fast chargers mainly coming from Chinese OEMs for suppliers such as Navitas and Power Integrations.”

When dealing with substrates,  we have two: silicon and sapphire. GaN on silicon is being developed mainly on six-inch wafers, though some grow it on eight-inch wafers.

“We will still see GaN-based discrete devices, but it’s more suitable for high power applications for example in the data center or the power supply for base stations,” said Ben Slimane.

In the RF GaN domain, “Huawei already adopted gallium nitride power amplifiers in its 4G LTE base stations several years ago. And then with the arrival of 5G, we also have to go to higher frequencies beyond 3GHz. Still, we call them sub six gigahertz. Gallium nitride has even more and more potential because, at high frequency, the power density is still excellent compared to the LDMOS, and the power added efficiency also follows,” added Dogmus.

Figure 3: Power GaN Market. Click to enlarge the image (Source: Yole)

The adoption of GaN technology will have a good relevance in the 5G sub-ghz with particular attention to its use in high power base stations, but also in new active antenna systems. In the latter case the idea is to use low power active antennas but with many more antennas requiring various power amplifiers. One parameter to consider is power efficiency.

Power efficiency is an essential parameter in the RF domain for an amplifier, because it will tell you how much it will heat, how much you will lose in terms of thermal dissipation.

“By replacing the silicon technology with GaN, we were relying on the efficiency of the game to provide a much faster switching, also in terms of volume reduction for the power supply in itself. So, you can increase the data center capacity, which is very significant in the case of GaN devices,” said Ezgi.

“For the adoption of gallium nitride for the data centers, as of today we see a slow ramp adoption; this is because of the lack of regulations. So, there is a need from government to impose stringent regulations on data centers to reduce power consumption; then we will be able to see a higher penetration  in this application, said Ahmed

As high efficiency requirements increase, gallium nitride will indeed play an important role compared to silicon, which is still meeting current requirements.There has been significant development activity on full SiC modules, with a special focus on packaging materials such as die attach and substrate interconnections.

The packaging of power modules must be suitable, adapted to silicon carbide devices. In order to meet 100% silicon carbide requirements, a new type of packaging must be developed in which you can really benefit from high temperature operation, high frequency switching and so on.

The post Power GaN and SiC Enter a New Era appeared first on EE Times Asia.

from EE Times Asia https://ift.tt/3fhFG88