The can that flies: Luxembourg schoolchildren launch their own satellites

Last Friday, at the military launch site in Eselborn, right on the Belgian border, a slight buzz was heard - not from a drill, but from the launch of mini-satellites. Students from several Luxembourg schools had completed months of hard work by launching their CanSats, satellites the size of soda cans.

CanSat is an educational initiative of the European Space Agency (ESA) in Luxembourg, supported by ESERO. It sets school students an almost real space challenge: to build a working satellite with a scientific mission, fitting into a volume of 330 ml. From October 2024, participants and their teachers trained, tested, programmed and assembled the miniaturised devices, and their progress was evaluated by an expert jury of space industry professionals.

The culmination took place on 26 April: rockets were used to lift the satellites to an altitude of more than 1,000 metres. There they began their mission - to collect data that teams later analysed as real ESA mission engineers.

The winner was the Can.Net team from Lycée Vauban, demonstrating scientific precision and excellent technical realisation. Their reward is a trip in June to the ESTEC space research centre near Amsterdam, where engineers and scientists from the European Space Agency are based.

This project was not only a test of technical knowledge, but also a demonstration of how scientific interest can be ignited even in a school laboratory. And who knows - maybe in a few years, these students will be working on Luxembourg's real orbiters.