LUCID: The School Experiment That Went Into Space

In the summer of 2014, a Soyuz rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan carrying a British satellite called TechDemoSat-1. Among its eight scientific payloads, built by universities and space companies, was one with an unusual origin. It had been dreamt up in a school physics department in Canterbury, by sixth-formers.

The instrument was called LUCID, the Langton Ultimate Cosmic ray Intensity Detector. For the next three years it orbited roughly 635km above the Earth, recording the radiation that streams through space. Then school students analysed the data and published the results in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

This is the story of how that happened, and of the teacher who believed young people could do real science long before anyone else thought it possible.

A coach trip to Geneva

Becky Parker had been head of physics at Simon Langton Grammar School for Boys in Canterbury for many years. The school, a state grammar with a mixed sixth form, already ran an annual trip to CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva. Parker had first visited in 1993 and began taking pupils two years later.

In 2007, she travelled around ten hours by coach with roughly fifty students. At CERN they saw the work of the Medipix collaboration, a team developing tiny pixel detector chips, known as Timepix and Medipix, that were used in particle physics and medical imaging.

Back in Kent, the students heard about a space experiment competition run by the British National Space Centre (now the UK Space Agency) and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL). Entrants had to design an experiment that could fly on a real satellite. The organisers warned that anything sent above the atmosphere would have to survive cosmic radiation, which can damage electronics. The students had a better idea: why not use the chips they had just seen at CERN to measure that radiation?

From a classroom idea to a satellite payload

The pupils designed a detector made of five Timepix chips arranged in a cube, four facing outwards on the sides and one in the centre. Parker has said the original team was three boys and three girls. Their entry did well enough to earn LUCID a place on SSTL’s TechDemoSat-1 satellite, and the hard work began.

The project quickly outgrew a single class. Students worked with SSTL engineers, with the Medipix team at CERN, and with physicists in the UK and the United States. By 2011, between thirty and forty students were involved at any one time. They organised themselves like a small research laboratory, with programmers, a publicity team and protocols for commanding the instrument once it was in orbit. As older students left for university, younger ones took over their roles, so the project kept going year after year.

The satellite’s launch slipped from the original 2012 plan, but on 8 July 2014 TechDemoSat-1 finally reached orbit. The Science and Technology Facilities Council noted that LUCID had taken seven years to go from first idea to lift-off. At launch, Dr Jonathan Eastwood, a space physicist at Imperial College, said: “LUCID isn’t just an educational experiment. Its research-quality data will be of direct interest to the wider science community.”

Real data, real research

LUCID collected data until July 2017, gathering more than 2.1 million frames of radiation measurements. Analysing that volume of information is a serious challenge for any research team. The students rose to it.

They built an online platform for managing Timepix data and developed a machine-learning approach to classify the millions of particle tracks the detector had recorded, using computing power from GridPP, the UK’s particle physics computing grid. Among their early results was a map of the South Atlantic Anomaly, a region where the Earth’s inner radiation belt dips closer to the planet’s surface.

In 2018, a paper reporting the first results from LUCID was accepted by the journal Advances in Space Research. Its authors included three sixth-form students. According to the scientist who guided them through writing and submission, the students proposed and carried out the research themselves. More than 100 students had worked on LUCID over the years.

A school that became a research centre

LUCID was not a one-off. Parker set up the Langton Star Centre in the school grounds, with laboratories and an astronomical observatory, so that students could work on genuine research projects alongside academic and industrial scientists. Through a programme called CERN@school, she shared smaller versions of the LUCID detector with other schools so their students could gather cosmic ray data too. By the time of the launch, CERN reported that ground-based detectors were monitoring cosmic rays in around thirty UK schools.

The effect on the Langton itself was striking. The Institute of Physics has estimated that pupils from the school make up around one per cent of the national cohort of physics undergraduates.

Parker’s work brought national recognition. She was appointed MBE in 2008 for services to science and education, received the Royal Astronomical Society’s Patrick Moore Medal in 2012, became an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and was awarded the Royal Society’s Kavli Education Medal in 2016. In 2016 she also founded the Institute for Research in Schools, a charity that opens research projects to school students and teachers across the UK.

Her own explanation of why it works is simple. “Students love getting involved in experimental work when the answers cannot be looked up on the next page,” she told Science in School in 2011.

What we can take into our classroom

Most of us will never send an experiment into orbit, but the habits behind LUCID work at any scale:

Give pupils a question nobody has answered yet. Even a small local investigation, such as measuring something in the school grounds over a term, feels different when the answer is not at the back of the book.
Let one experience spark the next. A trip, a visitor or a piece of kit can become the start of a project. Ask pupils afterwards: “What could we do with that?”
Treat pupils as a team with real roles. LUCID had programmers, a publicity team and people planning operations. Giving pupils defined responsibilities builds ownership.
Plan for handover. When older students passed their roles to younger ones, the project outlived any single year group. Long-running class projects can do the same.
Connect with experts. Universities, local businesses and scientists are often glad to answer pupils’ questions. A single email can open a door.
Share the results. Publishing a paper is the extreme version, but a school symposium, a poster display or a short talk to another class gives pupils the experience of presenting their own findings.

A final thought

LUCID began with a coach trip, a curious group of teenagers and a teacher who said yes to a very ambitious idea. Years later, a detector they designed had circled the Earth thousands of times, and students had turned its data into published science. It is a reminder that young people are capable of far more than we sometimes expect, especially when someone gives them real responsibility and trusts them to rise to it.