UPDATE: The contest is now accepting submissions until the 14th!
Looking for a different way to spend your 4th of July holiday, or perhaps you just need a midweek break to do some science? Why not create your own in-space experiment? Yup, you really could end up, in effect, with your own Earth-orbiting satellite if you win our sister magazine’s Discover Space Challenge.
NanoSatisfi, a company of aerospace experts working to democratize space access, is running a KickStarter campaign to fund such a satellite named ArduSat. The public will be able to rent time on this small satellite and use the device for whatever it pleases — from science experiments to pictures on-demand of Earth, the Moon, and the stars — courtesy of its Arduino processor.
The Discover Astronomy Space Challenge will give away a development kit worth $1,500 to the Kickstarter donor (of any amount of money) who submits the best idea for an in-space experiment before July 6, 2012. The kit includes Arduinos and an advanced sensor suite shipped to your home address, as well as one week of up-time on the satellite to run any experiment. You’ll be able to build the experiment yourself and have it sent up on ArduSat when it takes to the sky.
The staff at Discover wanted to share this contest with Astronomy’s audience because we all know there are quite a few citizen scientists in our readership. So check out the technical details of the satellite and the guidelines for the Discover Astronomy Space Challenge, and start planning your own space experiment! Full contest details are at discovermagazine.com. And remember to hurry; time is running out on this amazing opportunity.