NASA astronaut Joe Acaba on the International Space Station celebrates 10 years of the European space laboratory Columbus in orbit with a greeting and blowing out a digital candle on the educational computer Astro Pi.
Aboard the Columbus laboratory are two specially equipped Raspberry Pi computers, called Astro Pis. They are there to run code written by children and teenagers.
The Columbus laboratory ascended to orbit aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA on 7 February 2008. Nestling in the spaceplane’s cargo bay was Columbus.
On 11 February, the crew on the International Space Station captured the new arrival. At that moment, Columbus became Europe’s first permanent human outpost in orbit and Europe became a full partner of the International Space Station.
Columbus houses as many disciplines as possible in a small volume, from astrobiology to solar science through metallurgy and psychology – more than 225 experiments have been carried out during this remarkable decade. Countless papers have been published drawing conclusions from experiments performed in Columbus.
More about Columbus here: esa.int/Columbus