Author: cmejackson500

January 31:  The Lewis Center for Educational Research in Apple Valley, CA hosted an ARISS contact supported by Tom Marshburn for their students in 116 classes at the Academy of Academic Excellence and the Norton Science and Language Academy. They asked him 13 questions, some in English and some in Spanish. They followed Covid guidelines and the audience mix was: 176 educators and staff, 2,652 students, and 3,321 parents, community members and other space enthusiasts. The Center showed a video of students’ STEAM learning activities; after the ARISS contact a student question session was supported by astronaut Dan Tani.  Lewis offered a Facebook livestream of events at https://youtu.be/zvkNhysV-YI and ARISS simulcasted it on the ARISS YouTube Channel. In addition to Social Media postings done by Lewis and picked up by other venues, the High Desert Daily News prepared and ran a story:  https://www.hddailynews.com/news/local/aae-makes-long-distance-phone-call-to-international-space-station/article_86dd10ee-82ea-11ec-972c-23cfe9868feb.html.  Lewis staff began leading student STEAM activities in the 2021 Fall semester. Throughout January they taught some of the Christa McAuliffe Lost Lessons completed by Ricky Arnold and “What is a Satellite”–natural and human-made, i.e. ISS, and what each satellite is. Other lessons were “What is NASA SCaN,” how they communicate, the electromagnetic spectrum and its parts used to communicate. ARISS team members Christy and Bruce Hunter led some communications demos and activities with students. Lewis operates the Goldstone Apple Valley Radio Telescope astronomy program through a 25-year partnership with NASA/JPL.

February 2: ARISS was represented at the Space Exploration Educators Conference in Houston, TX. As part of the first day of the conference, the ISS National Lab held its hybrid-style annual Space Station Explorers’ Partners Meeting. ARISS team members Frank Bauer, Melissa Pore, Gina Kwid, and Rosalie White participated. At this meeting, NASA Office of STEM Engagement’s Mike Kincaid gave a lengthy talk. At the SEEC event, ARISS educators Melissa Pore gave a presentation related to ARISS and more details will be in next week’s report.

January 25 & February 2: In late January the Quantorium Children’s Technopark in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Russia, hosted a successful ARISS radio contact supported by Anton Shkaplerov. Then on February 2, Amur State University students took part in an ARISS radio contact with Pyotr Dubrov. Both groups of students are in the Gagarin from Space program.    

January 28: ARISS thanks SCaN for creating Twitter and Facebook posts about the ARISS contact at Lewis Center for Educational Research in California.

January 15: ARISS team member Randy Berger presented two ARISS forums at the Cowtown Hamfest in Forest Hill, TX. Between the two forums, attendees totaled 30. Randy had set up an ARISS exhibit area at a table and an estimated 80 people stopped by and asked questions about ARISS.

ARISS Social Media for January

ARISS Facebook

January ARISS Facebook followers totaled 7,249.
January ARISS Twitter followers were 15,866, a 1% gain over December. 
January Instagram followers grew to 393.  
January YouTube subscribers totaled 1,661, a 1% gain over December.    

Top Tweet in January – 4,162 Impressions

ARISS Upcoming Events 

February 4 Johannes-Kepler Gymnasium, Lebach, Germany, ARISS contact, ARISS-Europe Team
February 10 Gewerbliche Schulen, Donaueschingen, Germany, ARISS contact, ARISS Europe Team
February 11-13 ARRL National Convention, Orlando FL, exhibit & forum,  ARISS-US Team
February 14 University of Applied Sciences, Aachen, Germany, ARISS contact, ARISS-Europe Team

September-January: The Lewis Center for Educational Research in Apple Valley, CA has been sponsoring months of student STEM activities leading up to their ARISS radio contact on January 31. (All the results of their ARISS contact will be in next week’s report.)  Lewis Center educators developed 30-minute weekly lessons to engage K-5 students in all classes at the Academy for Academic Excellence and the Norton Science & Language Academy. Youth enjoyed many hands-on activities; two were Kennedy Space Center lessons, “Rocket Fuel Scientific Process,” testing various chemical reactions for launching rockets; and “Heat Shield Engineering,” students designing heat shields to protect their “choconaut,” and testing those with a hair dryer. Also, students simulated working in space gloves during an EVA by wearing puffy winter gloves while manipulating floral wire, nails, and screws on foam pieces. They will do NASA SCaN’s Whisper in Space and Line of Sight activities, and learn about ARISS communications. Area ARISS team members provided students with ham radio demos, presentations, and activities.

January 25: The Space Hardware Club (SHC) members at University of Huntsville, AL will host an ARISS contact for area middle schools; young students will be directly involved in the radio contact. In preparation, the undergrads led STEM-based activities at the middle schools. In an October weekly report, SHC members were highlighted for teaching basic rocketry to Buckhorn Middle School students in New Market who then built and launched their own model rockets. In November the undergrads helped Sparkman Middle School students in Toney to launch a high altitude balloon with a ham radio payload for tracking and analyzing the data. Now in January, these youngsters and undergrads are all looking forward to more activities and their mid-April ARISS contact.

December 31: ARISS is seeing more educators and youth take part in ARISS Slow Scan (SSTV) events. The December 2021 session caught the interest of five-year-old Mario Vazquez in Spain while he sat with his father at their home ham station.  Mario’s excitement piqued watching an ARISS transmission slowly form into an image on the computer screen. Afterwards, the two sent their download to the online ARISS SSTV Gallery, which qualified them to receive a diploma from the ARISS team in Poland. The father wrote, “Mario is five and wants to be an astronaut. The activity and the diploma have been a boost! He has been talking about ARISS all month at school … we cannot wait for the next ARISS SSTV transmissions. Meantime we are playing with NOAA and Meteor M2 satellites.”

ARISS awarded 3,911 SSTV diplomas to December participants requesting them. A podcast host who offered a set of December YouTube tutorials on the ARISS SSTV event garnered 44k viewers. Comments that a few left include: “I want to get my grandkids involved in this.”  “You’ve motivated me to try it!”  “My antenna is only 10’ off the ground and the ISS wasn’t even directly overhead–it was on the outer edge, and I still downloaded a good image.”

January 17: ARISS garnered a media hit in Dakota State University’s (DSU) “News 2022.” The online story, titled “Inspiring Students through Volunteer Work,” described an ARISS volunteer mentoring Savannah River Academy students throughout many months of 2021 on STEM lessons prior to their ARISS radio contact. The ARISS volunteer is a DSU cybersecurity doctoral student. The article quotes a Savannah River Academy’s science teacher noting that as young students gained more knowledge about space, their questions got more technical. She said: “I could really see the progression.” The URL is: https://dsu.edu/news/2022/01/inspiring-students.html?fbclid=IwAR3GPk4lMA5VDwH56oxn5_DAoMJdz8P9VYKLsVIwRTKPz8oFaJLPd0T2mvM

January 20:  Regarding another media hit, readers may recognize the photo in the screenshot. The photo was in a late November 2021 ARISS weekly report on Tecumseh (OK) students designing, developing and building a light-box project that lit up the ISS’ path across the Midwest during their ARISS contact. SCaN asked ARISS to ensure the high school knew about SIP interns. Several weeks later, the Countywide & Sun, an online Tecumseh news outlet featured a story on how NASA enjoyed learning about the light-box project. (Only subscribers can read the full story.)

ARISS Social Media

Top Tweet in January – 4,162 Impressions

ARISS Upcoming Events   

February 2 Amur State University, Blagoveshchensk Russia, ARISS contact, ARISS-Russia Team
February 3-5 Space Exploration Educators Conference, ARISS Forum, ARISS-US Team
February 4 Johannes-Kepler Gymnasium, Lebach, Germany, ARISS contact, ARISS-Europe Team
February 11-13 ARRL National Convention, Orlando FL, exhibit & forum, ARISS-US Team

January 14: ARISS-USA Education Director Kathy Lamont was featured at a Zoom meeting of the Nashua (NH) Area Radio Society. Her presentation, “Youth in Radio,” covered the many ways ham radio is used as a teaching tool in classrooms to engage youth in hands-on STEM. Attendees, totaling 35, learned how they could work with educators, and one posted, “Love the ideas and the excitement from both the presentation and the curriculum ideas.” The audience hailed from radio clubs in New Hampshire, New York, and New Jersey. The event was recorded for posting on the club’s web site for others to view.

January 14: ARISS had highlighted in an earlier weekly report that 2 of the 25 photos NASA posted online as the “Best Space Station Science Pictures of 2021” were ones featuring ISS crew members supporting ARISS contacts. This week, ARISS team mate Ana Guzman explained that the article about the winning photos was posted also at the NASA Spanish web site.  She and a colleague had done the translating of the article from English to Spanish. The URL is: Las mejores fotos de las investigaciones a bordo de la Estación Espacial en el 2021 | Ciencia de la NASA. ARISS thanks NASA and Ana for this.  ARISS is pleased that the photos and information on the ARISS contacts are available now for Spanish-speaking readers.

January 13: ARISS-USA Education Director Kathy Lamont and ARISS Technical Mentor Fred Kemmerer hosted an ARISS Orientation Webinar. The event was for schools and education organizations selected recently for ARISS radio contacts to be held in the second half of 2022.  Educators from those groups and representatives of their area amateur radio clubs who will assist the education groups attended the webinar—a total of 24 people. The groups heard a review of what is expected of them and they got answers to their questions.

January 17: The ARISS Team is planning final details for a forum and an exhibit booth to be at the ARRL 2022 National Convention. It is February 10-13 in Orlando, FL, and is one of the larger ham radio conventions held every year in the US.

ARISS Upcoming Events   

January 25 Quantorium Childrens Technopark, Komsomolsk-on-Amur Russia ARISS-Russia Team
January 31 Lewis Center for Education Research, ARISS contact, ARISS-US Team
February 2 Amur State University, Blagoveshchensk Russia, ARISS contact, ARISS-Russia Team
February 3-5 Space Exploration Educators Conference, ARISS Forum, ARISS-US Team
February 4 Johannes-Kepler Gymnasium, Lebach, Germany, ARISS contact, ARISS-Europe Team

January 8: ARISS-USA Director of Public Engagement Rita Dehart and a second member of the Tampa Amateur Radio Club staffed an ARISS exhibit table at the club’s hamfest, called TARCFest, in Tampa, Florida. The two described ARISS operations and activities with people stopping by the table. They distributed ARISS brochures to 32 particularly interested people.

January 11: ARISS distributed a news release announcing the schools and education organizations that were selected recently for ARISS radio contacts during the timeframe of July 1 through December 31, 2022. The groups were chosen by the ARISS-US Education Committee’s proposal review team after they analyzed the ARISS Education and Contact Proposal that all groups had prepared and submitted. To move forward in the processes of planning to host a scheduled ARISS contact with a crew member on the ISS, each group must develop and submit an equipment plan with the help of a newly assigned ARISS Technical Mentor. The schools and education organizations are:

• Buehler Challenger & Science Center                         Paramus, NJ
• Eaton Public Library                                                     Eaton, CO
• Davis Aerospace Technical High School                      Detroit, MI
• St. Stephen’s Episcopal School Houston                     Houston, TX
• Harris Middle School                                                    Spruce Pine, NC
• Kopernik Observatory & Science Center                      Vestal, NY
• Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital, Vanderbilt       Nashville, TN
• Canterbury School of Fort Myers                                  Fort Myers, FL

January 5:  ARISS volunteer Gordon West worked with a fellow commentator for Ham Radio Crash Course, a weekly online program, to develop a 10-minute feature on ARISS SSTV. The segment, which attracted 4,857 viewers, focused on how to download ARISS SSTV images. The talk covered the types of antennas and radios to use, good techniques for downloading SSTV images, and how to track the ISS.  The commentator offers a YouTube channel, also. He presented a You Tube video each day of the December 2021 ARISS SSTV session to guide people wanting to download images. His YouTube viewership topped 44,202! The commentator plans to present future programs on ARISS SSTV, so Rosalie White shared with him the following ARISS statistics from the December session:

Number of Educators and Students Voluntarily Reporting Their Participation:

• Students, high school or lower grades = 277    
• Educators, high school or lower grades = 348
• Students, college or higher grades such as postgraduate or pre-service teacher = 310
• Educators, college or higher grades = 685

ARISS Upcoming Events   

January 25 Quantorium Children’s Technopark, Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Russia, ARISS-Russia Team
Week of January 31 Lewis Center for Education Research, ARISS contact, ARISS-US Team

January 4: Scouts Victoria in Mt Waverley, Victoria, Australia hosted an ARISS contact with Mark Vande Hei during the week-long Victorian Scout Jamboree.  17 of the young people’s questions were answered with 100 people reported in attendance. The contact was livestreamed. The Jamboree enabled over 4,000 scouts, venturers, rovers and leaders to enjoy outdoor excitement and fun through challenging and inclusive programs. The Radio and Electronics Team provided support for the ARISS contact and for STEM-related activities, some on amateur radio, for scouts of all ages and abilities.

December 22: Two photos featuring ISS crew members engaging in ARISS activities on board the ISS were part of the 25 photos that NASA posted online as the “Best Space Station Science Pictures of 2021.” They were featured on NASA Twitter, also. One photo showed Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi carrying out an ARISS contact with students at Hisagi Junior High School in Zushi, Japan. A second photo featured Raja Chari speaking with students from Colegio Pumahue in Chile. ARISS is very proud of being presented as part of NASA science.

January 5: The ARRL Foundation awarded ARISS-USA the funding for the first year of a new two-year education initiative called the ARISS *STAR* Keith Pugh Memoriam Project. *STAR* is short for Space Telerobotics using Amateur Radio. ARISS honored Keith, who passed away in 2019, because he was one of ARISS’s star technical mentors. *STAR* goals are to improve and sustain ARISS STEM education outcomes through robotics for USA junior- and senior-high age youth. The hands-on activities will use APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System) for youth to remotely command robots on *STAR* telerobotics closed courses to be developed.       

December 11: ARISS educator Melissa Pore gave a Small Sat Talk presentation to University of Southern Maine Student Satellite developers. Her talk featured what her high school students are learning this semester, such as payload options, design approaches, and resources for CubeSat developers in high school and their teachers.

January 1: ARISS was proud to announce that the ARISS SSTV Gallery now sports just over 150,000 Slow Scan TV (SSTV) images posted by thousands of individuals. SSTV sessions on the ISS first began in 2008 and the number of enthusiastic followers continued to grow over the years. The manager of the global team thanked the dedicated volunteers for the ARISS successes, reporting that the December year-end 2021 SSTV session garnered 15,897 posted images.

ARISS Social Media for December

ARISS Facebook

December ARISS Facebook followers totaled 7,638.    
December ARISS Twitter followers were 15,866, a 2% gain over November. 
December Instagram followers grew to 390.
December YouTube subscribers totaled 1,592.

Top Performing December Facebook Post over 12 days’ time — reached 19,733 people

ARISS Upcoming Events   
Week of January 31   Lewis Center for Education Research, ARISS contact, ARISS-US Team

December 16: Two German schools, Technisches Bildungszentrum Mitte (TBZ Mitte) in Bremen and Carl Prueter Oberschule in Sulingen hosted an ARISS radio contact with Matthias Maurer. Each school set up a ham radio station and each school’s students asked 5 questions. 23 students and teachers gathered to view the action and 10 classrooms holding 214 people watched the livestream. Media coverage included Radio Bremen Hörfunk, Radio Bremen TV, and RTL Nord’s livestream. The schools offered three livestreams for anyone to watch. Students at TBZ Mitte developed and built the school’s ham radio system. Project manager Jan Benje said, “Our goal was to involve as many students as possible across the training school. The technical students built the bracket to hold the antenna, the antenna and the student-built antenna control system were developed by our information electronics engineers, and the aerospace engineers worked out the questions for students to ask. Not all students could be there so technician students streamed the event.” The new ham radio station can be used in classes to receive weather satellites and the school may set up ham radio courses with help from the German Amateur Radio Club.

December 10:  K-8 students attending Savannah River Academy in Grovetown, GA interviewed Thomas Marshburn during their ARISS radio contact. He answered 20 questions. 117 students, 28 teachers, and 175 parents/guardians witnessed the event. US Congressman Rick Allen and Governor Brian Kemp sent the school congratulations letters. Students had enjoyed nearly a full year of a wide variety of STEM space and radio hands-on activities in preparation for their ARISS radio contact. Student Zion Newsome said, “I was in shock when first learning I would be able to ask questions of the space station’s occupants.” Media covering the events were The Augusta Chronicle (online video and article), The Augusta Press (online article), WRDW Channels 12 /26 (with video) and WJBF Channel 6 (with video). 

December 16: ARISS educator Drew Deskur heads the Kopernik Observatory and Science Center in Vestal, NY. It was one of several US groups to become a NASA Informal Education Community Anchor and to receive the Teams Engaging Affiliated Museums and Informal Institutions (TEAM II) Community Anchor Award. Funding from the Kopernik award is for its new Ready, Set, Go and Explore project targeting inner-city Binghamton Central Schools and rural Candor Central Schools. ARISS concepts are included in the new project’s curriculum. Kopernik hosts ARISS contacts at its summer camps. Regarding the TEAM II award, NASA Associate Administrator for STEM Mike Kincaid said, “NASA has bold, long-term goals, so it’s critically important that we reach students where they are, and create opportunities for them to experience those feelings of discovery and confidence that STEM engagement is really all about.”        

December 13: Wolfgang-Kubelka-Realschule (WKR) in Schondorf am Ammersee, Germany sponsored an ARISS contact with Matthias Maurer who answered 14 student questions. 380 people witnessed the event–300 were students in school rooms watching the livestream.  One radio station and one newspaper reporter attended.  WKR is part of the MINT (STEM) network with focuses on computer science, technology, natural science, and math. Studies leading up to the ARISS contact included life on the ISS, satellites, ISS research, balloon launches with onboard radio transmitter, and visits to the German Aerospace Center Satellite Ground Station and Columbus Control Center.

December 10:  Students at DLR_School_Lab (German Aerospace Center) Braunschweig in Germany talked with Matthias Maurer during their ARISS contact. Due to Covid, many students tied in from their homes. Maurer answered 19 student questions while 310 students and other viewers watched via a live stream, available at this link: https://youtu.be/0cGJuwnhaSI.  In the months leading up to the ARISS contact, over 2,000 youth ages 11-18 participated in hands-on experiments in aeronautics, satellite navigation, energy, and ham radio communications and enjoyed a virtual spacewalk.  

December 15: Frank Bauer and ARISS Education Director Kathy Lamont led an ARISS Webinar for Educators hosted by the ISS National Lab. Participants included 29 formal educators and 4 informal educators. The presentation covered how ARISS affects students, how ARISS STEM can be incorporated in classes, and how educators can submit education proposals for ARISS contacts. 100 had registered for the webinar and they will receive the URL for the recorded talk to watch at any time.

December 21: Berufliche Schule Direktorat 1 Nürnberg, in Nuremberg, Germany held an ARISS contact with Matthias Maurer; he answered 12 student questions. 21 educators and 187 students watched from various locations in the school via livestreaming. A newspaper reporter plans to prepare an article about the event.  The school offers courses in electrical engineering, electronics information technology and mechatronics, with many classes held in workshops and industrial settings. Student activities include making amateur radio contacts and building circuit boards for electronic projects.

December 26-31: Worldwide ARISS team members put together another enormously popular ARISS SSTV (Slow Scan TV, picture downlinks) session for educators, students, space enthusiasts, shortwave listeners, and ham radio operators. Images related to Lunar explorations were downlinked from the ISS by Cosmonauts. Images offered were suggested by ARISS volunteers around the globe.  3,720 people have downloaded 15,528 images that they posted to the ARISS SSTV Gallery at: https://www.spaceflightsoftware.com/ARISS_SSTV/index.php.

December 23: ARISS educator Micol Ivancic and ARISS volunteer Fabrizio Carrai hosted an online webinar on how to receive ARISS Slow Scan TV (SSTV) transmissions on December 27-31. 20 people viewed their presentation. A second webinar was held on the 27th during an actual ISS pass when the crew was downlinking images. This allowed 8 viewers to follow along in receiving and downloading SSTV signals and to look at each person’s resulting images.

ARISS Upcoming Events   
TBD

December 3: Hino Elementary School in Suzaka, Japan hosted an ARISS radio contact with Raja Chari. He answered all 15 of the students’ questions. The school, along with 20 other Japanese schools (ranging from elementary through senior high), participated in the Canna Project Peace Space Mission; some of those schools’ students were involved also in ARISS activities. The audience count was 17, while the online count was 354. Reporters came from a TV station and 3 newspapers. The YouTube video of the ARISS contact shows young ladies waving fans displaying artwork of their Canna Project logo; the video URL is (begin watching at 4 minutes): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXimIESrVBk. Seeds from the Canna plant had been launched to the ISS and then returned for students to grow and monitor.  One of the school’s goals is to inspire students’ interest and curiosity in space and the Canna Amateur Radio Club supported the school.

December 6: ARISS has been awarded the Amateur Radio Newsline International Newsmaker of the Year Award for 2021. The honor is for individuals and groups who have represented the ham radio service in the “best possible ways during the year.” The award states, “Newsline recognizes ARISS in 2021 for opening the wonders of the International Space Station to children around the world through amateur radio through ‘linkups’ with astronauts and cosmonauts for more than 20 years.”

December 9: A school for young ladies, the Notre Dame Jogakuin Junior and Senior High School in Kyoto, Japan, hosted an interview with Raja Chari during an ARISS contact. He answered 13 of the young ladies’ questions. The event was live streamed at https://youtu.be/9q7szmwEz4o and starts with a recording of school activities; the portion on the ARISS contact begins at 35 minutes. A few days later, another 1,214 people watched the YouTube. The school’s programs leading up to this contact incorporated studies of the ISS, space exploration, earth sciences, and radio. Some activities included experiments in electronics related to space and learning about the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. To publicize the ARISS contact to other youth, students provided illustrations for a booth at the Tachibana school festival.

December 7: WRDW-TV in Augusta, GA posted an article announcing the upcoming ARISS contact with Savannah River Academy in Grovetown, GA. The write-up mentions students engaging in a special curriculum over several months to prepare them for the contact, studying basic electronics, radio communications, and code along with lessons on space.

October 30:  Astronaut Dan Tani came to ARISS educator Melissa Pore’s Bishop O’Connell High School in Arlington, VA to talk about space. The presentation was part of Pore’s initiative that was accepted for the school’s Global Studies program, which features the international cooperation necessary for space and ARISS to be a successful venture.

November 19: NASA Space Update ran an item about the South Yarra Primary School ARISS contact. The Australian school’s students had their contact on November 9.

Dec 4 & 7: The ARISS-Russia team supported ARISS radio contacts for Aznakaev students in the Republic of Tatarstan, Russia and for undergrads at South West State University, Kursk, Russia. More details will be provided soon.           

November 29: The Tank Radio online talk show host invited ARRL Division Director (New York and New Jersey) Ria Jiaram to talk about ARISS. She described for 113 viewers the upcoming ARISS contact for Sussex County (NJ) Charter School for Technology. She highlighted many of the students’ STEM activities and has been mentoring the students in aspects of wireless radio in preparation for their contact.   

ARISS Upcoming Events   

Dec 16 Technisches Bildungszentrum Mitte & Carl Prueter Oberschule, Germany, ARISS-Europe team