Following their success in securing a 2024 Extension grant, our Sutton High School Royal Society Partnership student team had the honour of showcasing their work as members of the Young Researcher Zone at this year’s annual Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition in St. James’s, London. Throughout 2023 and 2024, our student team conducted innovative research under The Royal Society Partnership Grants Scheme, focused on transmitting air quality sensor and computer vision image recognition results during flight.
Their exhibition instalment involved a solar-powered UAV aircraft, developed in collaboration with the Cranfield University CranSEDS, to demonstrate advanced airborne computing payload capabilities. During the length of the project, they also collaborated with Launch Access Ltd. and Cambridge University Space Flight to build and test high-altitude balloon and model rocket computing payloads ahead of pursuing the build of the target aircraft, designed to power itself as well as its onboard computing imager. The team received substantial computing payload data processing support from NASA Earth Science Data Systems and NASA-IMPACT, and also from Amazon Web Services (AWS), who provided them with a generous Proof of Concept student tech investment for cloud-based computer vision (image recognition) processing.
Our students had the opportunity to showcase their findings to some of the world’s most eminent scientists, alongside 14 outstanding research groups and more than 300 scientists from across the UK. Special acknowledgment is also owed to our leading STEM partners for the project: Ben Jarvis (Launch Access Ltd.), William Yu (Cambridge University Space Flight), Sam Mahoney, Muhammad Haad Shaikh and Syed Shane Raza Abidi (Cranfield University CranSEDS), and Elizabeth Joyner (NASA Earth Science Data Systems). Many congratulations to our Sutton High Team for their long-term pursuit of this partnership project (spanning from late 2022!), working in conjunction with the Sutton High Computer Science department and GDST cross-Trust Space Technology Diploma provisions.
