As a part of Stardust-R outreach programme we organised a meeting with the Space Club of St. Columba’s school in Kilmacolm, Scotland. The meeting was organised via Teams on 1^st of March 2022. The space club of St.Columba’s secondary school is a team of 14-17 year old pupils interested in space science. The club is supervised by the math teacher Mr D. Stark. They are currently working on the following projects:  

• CANSAT – devising a satellite to run experiments.  https://www.esa.int/Education/CanSat.
• AstroPi – running experiments on the space station – https://astro-pi.org/.
• The club achieved a silver award for a European Space Education Quality Mark (https://www.stem.org.uk/esero/space-education-quality-mark).
• Kids also took part in the Martian Challenge (https://heliumlearninglabs.com/martian-challenge/) and did research articles on habits for Mars.

The school’s next ambition is to run a pilot course/qualification course in Space Education/Sciences.  They have just submitted an application for some funding via the UK Space Agency – https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/space-for-all-community-funding-scheme-2022 

The Stardust-R team comprising university lecturer Dr. Christie Maddock, eraly stage researchers Sai Abhishek Peddakotla and Lewis Walker told kids about current challenges related to space debris. Dr. Maddock explained how scientist can help to reduce amount of space junk and what expertise is required. Abhishek and Lewis spoke about their personal projects. The kids asked very interesting questions and presented two research articles they have written recently:

• Mars Pod

• An outline of the design and construction of a Myco-architecture based Martian habitat.