CanSat Portugal is an initiative promoted by the Education Office of the European Space Agency (ESERO) that stimulates the interest of young people in secondary education in science and technology as it simulates a real space mission.
This competition pushes students to build a functional microsatellite, the size of a soda can, and to idealise a scientific mission that it will carry out. During a rocket launch, the satellite must be capable of collecting data and sending it, by telemetry, to a reception station operated by the students. The students are asked to idealise the mission and build, in small volume, a “machine” capable of carrying it out. It will have to contain a power source (batteries or other), a microcontroller or microprocessor (the satellite’s brain), a set of sensors, a localisation system (GPS or other) and a communication system to send all this information, in real-time, by radio frequency, at least once every second.
