MIRA: a data management and education platform connecting students to robotic telescopes

Hands-on telescope experience is often used to drive student engagement in astronomy education, but scaling access to larger groups of students is operationally challenging.

Consequently, students encounter only a fraction of the professional workflow, rarely engaging with the rigorous peer-review, time-allocation processes, or automated data reduction pipelines that govern modern research facilities.

We present the design of MIRA (Mentored Investigations using Robotic Astronomy), a data management and educational platform that connects Swiss secondary school and undergraduate students with operational robotic observatories.

MIRA structures the entire observation lifecycle: proposal, review, acceptance/rejection, scheduling, and observation.

Following execution, the platform automatically reduces raw FITS frames (including astrometric calibration and photometry) and serves them via a web-accessible archive accompanied by Python-based analysis tutorials.

By separating educational front-ends from low-level telescope controls through Astra and ASCOM Alpaca, MIRA delivers an authentic scientific research workflow that bridges classroom learning with professional observatory operations.