Navarino is very proud to sponsor the remarkable Zanneio high school team who managed to get their experiment blasted into space onboard one of Amazon’s Jeff Besos Blue Origin rockets. The experiment, designed by Zanneio school students, was presented at the Eugenides Foundation on the 24th of February 2020, following the successful launch on the 11th of December from Texas, USA. This rocket is owned by Blue Origin, who believe that true operational reusability is the only way to lower the cost of access to space. Blue Origin rockets have been designed with reusability in mind from the beginning. Their vertical take off, vertical landing architecture enables them to reuse the first stage of their launch vehicles with minimal refurbishment. This allows for high asset utilization for all their space vehicles which decreases the costs and increases availability of space travel. This was the sixth time that the same rocket was used making it a world record for Blue Origin.
The students’ experiment was “Mass measurement in conditions of micro – gravity” was housed inside the rocket capsule, so after a year of hard work, with many hours of designing, construction and testing, the students had the unique experience to see their experiment launched in space. Their experiment was aimed at answering the question: “How can we weigh an object in space’s micro – gravity conditions?” Obviously, a normal scale wouldn’t work, but the answer which the students finally concluded is that while mass measurement in space cannot be weighed, the period of an object’s oscillation can be measured independent from its mass. Everyone at Navarino would like to congratulate these students on their tremendous work and we look forward to their next experiments!