Cátia Cardoso

Aimed at both in-person and online participants

Elsa Alfonso Sanchez (Aurora Technology for ESA); Other co-authors: Monica Talevi (ESA); Allysse Marshall (ESA); Laylan Saadaldin (EJR-Quartz for ESA); Kate Isaak (ESA); Maximilian Guenther (ESA); Sandor Kruk (ESA); Davide Gandolfi (ESA CHEOPS Science Team member/University of Torino)
Hack an Exoplanet is a hackathon activity for secondary students organised by ESA Education. This inspirational learning activity challenges students (14 to 19 years old) to be space detectives for one day and profile two ‘mysterious’ exoplanets: KELT-3b and TOI-560c. Join this workshop to become a space detective and hack an exoplanet. The activity includes an online event in April 2023, and physical hackathons taking place in April and May 2023 at ESA facilities, as well as volunteer science centres and schools across Europe. The hackathon activities are freely available in 21 languages. Teams that participate in a hackathon are invited to submit their project and apply for the Best Project prize. During the hackathons students have access to data collected by ESA’s Cheops (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite) specifically for this activity. Cheops is a satellite that studies known exoplanets in-depth. Its mission is to observe known exoplanets and characterise them by looking at the dip of stellar light caused by the planets’ transit of their host stars. The data collected by the satellite in January 2023 has been made available immediately by ESA for the hack an exoplanet activity, but can also be used for scientific purposes. The Hack an Exoplanet platform provides a variety of inspirational resources for educators to engage students in STEM subjects using the fascinating topic of exoplanets as the learning context, including classroom resources, videos with experts, a quiz, the opportunity to ask a scientist a question and much more. This educational activity was developed by ESA Education in collaboration with the ESA Science directorate, with support from members of the international Cheops Mission Consortium and the ESERO network.