April 7: An ARISS radio contact was hosted at Collège Saint-Anatoile in Salins-Les-Bains, a rural area in the Franche Comté region of France. During the contact, Steve Bowen answered 20 student questions. 100 students, professors, parents, and city and regional officials attended the event or watched the livestream from other rooms, as did 60 students at a neighboring school. Within two days’ time, 2,000 people had viewed the recording. The event was well covered by media—newspapers Le Progres and L’Est Républicain, TV station France3 (their short video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at8fGjEwXSY), and radio stations France Bleu and RCF. The school had incorporated many STEM projects into the curriculum. Members of the area and regional amateur radio clubs sponsored workshops for students to introduce them to amateur radio communications, radio direction-finding, amateur radio satellites, wave propagation, and tracking the ISS.
April: Council Rock High School South in Holland, PA is scheduled for their ARISS contact early in May. Teachers prepared the students for the contact through special space-related curriculum and projects. The two photos below show part of the work students did to build and set up ham radio antennas with some of their teachers and members of the area’s Warminster Amateur Radio Club. Students also enjoyed getting on the air to make ham radio contacts. ARISS learned last week that US Senator Bob Casey plans to attend the school’s ARISS contact.
April 8-15: ARISS-Russia carried out six ARISS radio contacts under the About Gagarin In Space education program. The schools scheduled by MCC-Moscow included Vologda College of Communications and Information Technologies in Vologda with crew member Dimitri Petelin; Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad with crew member Sergey Prokopyev; Ural State University of Railway Engineering in Yekaterinburg with Sergey Prokopyev; Admiral D.N. Senyavin Marine Technical Academy in St. Petersburg with crew member Andrey Fedyaev; MBOU School #5 for Students with Disabilities in Shchelkovo with Sergey Prokopyev, and MBOU Secondary School #1 in Vyborg with Andrew Fedyaev. Two of these contacts, those at Yekaterinburg and St. Petersburg, took place on Cosmonautics Day.
March 31: ARISS educator Drew Deskur, director of the Kopernik Observatory and Science Center in Vestal, NY offers space education presentations and classes to area youth. He helped students listen on ham radio to an ARISS radio contact at Stone Magnet Middle School in Melbourne, FL. His students heard Steve Bowen’s answers to students’ questions as the ISS passed over Vestal, then Vestal students discussed the questions and answers. Meantime, ARISS educator Kathy Lamont did the same thing with her students at Belmont Elementary School in Prince William County, VA. She had her students read the Stone Magnet Middle School students’ questions, and then her kids listened to Bowen’s replies as the ISS passed overhead. She recorded her students in order to post a video on Twitter; the video got 202 Views!
ARISS Upcoming Events
Apr 18: Mohammad Bin Rashid Space Centre, Dubai, UAE – ARISS contact, ARISS-Europe Team