DIY Geiger Kit in a Rocket

Canadian students use a DIY Geiger Kit in a CanSat to study ionization radiation

It's always great to hear when the Geiger Kit is used for educational purposes.
The following article was written by a Canadian high school group who are taking part in a CanSat competition (described below).
DIY Geiger wishes the team all the best on their journey.
Note that as new updates become available, this page will be updated.

Alphabet-SAT is a team of five high school students from St. Thomas More Collegiate in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada competing in the Canadian CanSat competition. If successful at the national level, they would represent their country at the European Space Agency’s CanSat competition later in June.

CanSat is a European Space Agency (ESA) initiative designed for high school students from ESA Member States, Canada, Latvia, Lithuania or Slovenia. Students are challenged to build a miniature satellite that fits within the size dimensions of a soda can - hence the name CanSat. The mini-satellites incorporate power, sensor and communication subsystems. On competition day, CanSats are launched by rocket to an altitude around one kilometer or dropped from helicopters, drones or balloons.All teams in a CanSat competition share the same primary mission: collect temperature, pressure and humidity data from the atmosphere and transmit that data via radio signals to a ground station and graph the results. All teams must also choose a unique secondary mission.

This year, due to team members’ interest in particle physics, Alphabet-SAT chose to conduct an experiment incorporating radiation detection. Using a Geiger-Müller tube and GK-mini Geiger Kit to measure radiation and a carbon dioxide sensor to record atmospheric CO2 levels, the team is investigating the link between varying CO2 and radiation levels. As carbon dioxide emissions continue to collect in the atmosphere, understanding the relationship between greenhouse gasses and radiation could be important as the world continues to realize both the current and future effects of climate change on us and our planet. This project is aimed at building an understanding of how background radiation could change with the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Alphabet-SAT’s internal structure and configuration is pictured above. Components are designed to be serviceable with minimal disassembly. The CanSat centers around the Geiger-Müller tube which is the most significant component, both in size and centrality to research, integrated within the design. Currently, Alphabet-SAT’s design is nearing completion as they prepare for the upcoming Canadian CanSat competition.

Mission data and analysis will follow after the competition!