Between May 12-14, 2023, eight teams of high school students from across the country will participate in the finals of the ninth edition of CanSat National Competition. The event is organized by the Romanian Space Agency (ROSA) through ESERO Romania — a collaborative project of European Space Agency (ESA) and PINK — in partnership with West University of Timişoara and Banat Caransebeș Airport.

ESERO Romania - The European Resource Office for Space Education - Romania - is a project designed to arouse students' interest in the STEM disciplines – Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics – by using outer space as an educational context.

ESERO Romania's partners for the organization of the CanSat National Competition 2023 are the Western University of Timișoara - the Department for Relations with the Pre-university Environment and the Faculty of Physics - as well as the Banat Caransebeș Airport. The event is organized with the support of One Source Association, Dunca Expeditions and Bosch Service Solutions. The West University of Timișoara will host the participants - the accompanying students and teachers - as well as a number of tests of the competition, and the launch of the minisatellites - the practical test - will take place on Saturday, May 13, at the Banat Caransebeș Airport. The Western University of Timișoara and the Banat Caransebeș Airport are the hosts of this event for the fourth time.

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The teams selected for the final stage of the competition are as follows:

• "Airforce" — "Ion C. Brătianu" National College - Pitesti;
• "BioCoderDojo Timișoara SpaceBugs" - "Nikolaus Lenau" Theoretical High School, Banățean National College, "Ana Aslan" National College, "Grigore Moisil" Theoretical High School, "Jean Louis Calderon" Theoretical High School - Timișoara;
• "Carmen Sylva 4: Sentinel" — "Carmen Sylva" Theoretical High School - Eforie-Sud;
• "MBM Space" — International Theoretical High School of Informatics, "IL Caragiale" National College, "'Spiru Haret" National College - Bucharest;
• "Nexus" — "Petru Rareș" National College - Suceava;
• "Ouranos" — Covasna County Center of Excellence - Sfântu-Gheorghe;
• "Robots Rover" — National College "Dragoș Vodă" - Campulung Moldovenesc;
• "Tomis 9" — National College "Mircea Cel Batrân" - Constanta.

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The CanSat competition is a simulation of a satellite integrated into the volume and shape of a standard soft drink can. The challenge for the students is to fit all the major subsystems of a satellite—such as sensors, power supply, and communications—into a 330-milliliter canister.

The CanSat will be launched from an altitude of about one kilometer, it will have to complete a mission and land safely. The projects selected for this year's edition will be launched by helicopter. The launch campaign will take place at Banat Caransebeș Airport. Before launch, the CanSat prepared by each team will go through a technical inspection that will determine if it meets the conditions imposed for size, weight, radio communications and parachute.

The winning team of the National Competition will qualify for the finals of the European CanSat Competition 2023, organized by the European Space Agency in Granada, Spain, in June.

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More details about CanSat in Europe are available on the official ESERO Romania page (http://www.esero.ro/) and on the CanSat website (http://www.cansat.eu).

For a detailed program of the event, we invite you to follow the Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/esero.romania/, where news will be posted during the event.

INFO: Media representatives are invited to attend the event. For press information, the contact persons are Mrs. Cristina Stancu, cristina.stancu@rosa.ro and Mr. Virgiliu Pop, virgiliu.pop@rosa.ro, co-managers of ESERO Romania.