Regional Final, iQLANDIA Science center, Liberec, Czech Republic

The Odysseus regional semi-final for Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania was organised by the Czech Space Office in iQLANDIA Science center in Liberec from 4th April to 8th April 2016. The event featured an extensive hands-on activities programme and excursions when in addition to presenting their project entries in front of a jury, the semi-finalists visited space science-related laboratories, attended lectures, met space professionals and participated in fun-oriented activities with altogether 31 students from the region.

In a very exciting contest of 13 teams, two of the Pioneers teams tied for the first place due to the high quality of their presentations and they both qualified to the International Final.

1. The team from the Gymnasium Jaroslava Seiferta in Prague and Gymnasium Špitálská in Prague with the project “Finding prediscovery positions of minor planets”, ASTEROIDS in short, consisting of the students Jakub Janoušek, Lukáš Sláma and Michal Koldinský and coached by Mr Daniel Mareš. The team aimed at searching archive images of minor planets to improve their orbits. In case of few of them team provided more precise orbital parameters and they have discovered one unknown minor planet. However, this still has not been verified by the US Minor Planet Center. Their results show that the old databases still contain lots of useful data about minor planets and their properties.
2. The team from the “Tudor Vianu” National High School of Computer Science, with the project AstroVianu Lab, consisting of the the students Andreea Zaharia and Vlad Panait, coached by Ms Ioana Stoica. This project  is based on the concerns in astrobiology to determine whether or not an unexplored planet is habitable. Students have chosen the mission to implement a planetary rover to measure and, hence, study certain vital parameters on such a territory.

Team photo of all participants in the iQLANDIA Science center

Participants presenting their project in front of the evaluators

The winning teams receiving their medals

Half of the ten evaluators

The world’s first minisatellite MAGION-1

Tour of the Ionospheric observatory in Průhonice