Author: cmejackson500

December 15:  The Oregon Charter Academy in Mill City, OR, held its ARISS radio contact for students to talk to Shannon Walker.  She answered 20 of their questions. Students at home were connected to the radio contact through ARISS Multi-point Telebridge Via Amateur Radio. ARISS’s volunteer at his ham station in Queensland, Australia relayed the audio between Walker at the ISS ham station and students.  Over 2,000 of the school’s youth viewed the event live and had been studying communications and lessons on space from Space Center Houston for many weeks.  KPTV-23 in Portland ran a story during its news broadcast and KGW-TV featured the radio contact in a news clip and an online article. KYAC FM broadcasted the live audio feed, and the online SpaceRef included a short piece in its daily status report on NASA.  The ARISS YouTube Channel posted the school’s video of the contact. The KGW-TV link is: https://www.kgw.com/article/news/education/oregon-charter-academy-students-interview-nasa-astronaut-on-international-space-station/283-73bed430-aac5-45a4-b575-bcd0e4421107

December 24-31: An ARISS Slow Scan TV (SSTV) session celebrated ARISS’s 20 years of successes through having cosmonauts downlink 12 different images from ARISS’s history files. The first day of the session caused ARISS to reach a 100K milestone: as images were posted at the online ARISS SSTV Gallery (http://www.spaceflightsoftware.com/ARISS/SSTV/) the total of all images posted since the first-ever SSTV session surpassed 100,000! People who are space enthusiasts, students, educators, and hams find these sessions to be great fun, downloading images with a ham radio or phone app to store on smartphones or computers before posting to the Gallery.  The ARISS team will know soon the final count of participants and downloaded images during this session.  Two quotes that enthralled youth participants sent are:  A) My first SSTV image. I’m 13 years old.  B) I’m 17 years old and the youngest private pilot license holder from India. I’m an amateur radio enthusiast.

December 23: The ARISS program was featured in an article in the Los Angeles Times. The article led with the excitement of having ham radio onboard the ISS from the astronaut’s point of view. Doug Wheelock said he quickly saw ARISS as a conduit to companionship with regular people on earth, “It allowed me to…just reach out to humanity down there…. It became my emotional, and a really visceral, connection to the planet.” The writer interviewed and quoted Kenneth Ransom, Rosalie White, and other ARISS volunteers on ARISS’s many aspects including among other things, schools and what the average person of various ages thinks of ARISS contacts. The link to the article is: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-12-23/ham-radio-and-astronauts  Many media outlets picked up the article, including MSN, Yahoo News, Reddit, Physics Everywhere, Vectors Journal, American Institute of Physics (at phys.org), Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the Dubuque Iowa’s Telegraph-Herald, and various outlets specializing in space news.

December 15: In the last report, the Tecumseh High School’s ARISS contact of December 4 was described. Since then, the lead educator has tracked the views of the video of the contact on the school Facebook page and three other web sites.  The total views reached 10,000. He reported that this number didn’t include views of stories run on area TV stations and in area newspapers.

ARISS Social Media
Facebook in December 2020

 *Also, the total of the Best Reach number and the Best Likes number for October through December nearly doubled over the previous quarter.

Twitter: As of December 31, 2020, ARISS Twitter followers totaled 14,180, a gain of 381 over November.

Instagram: As of December 31, 2020, Instagram followers increased to 224 from November.

YouTube Members: As of December 31, 2020, there are 820 YouTube members.

Upcoming Events    

January 6:  The Oswaldo Guayasamín School of Basic Education in Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz Island, Ecuador has been scheduled for an ARISS contact with Victor Glover. Eighteen schools on four of the Galapagos Islands have been studying space and the environment with the Puerto Ayora school and will listen to the contact online.

January 13: An ARISS radio contact has been scheduled for Shigagakuen Junior & Senior High School in Higashioumi, Japan. Shannon Walker will support the radio contact.

• November 12: The ISS National Laboratory compiled a 44-page report called 20 Years of Student Experiments on the ISS.  The report highlighted ARISS in a number of different sections.  In the first few pages, the introduction section titled “Scope of this Study” calls out ARISS, stating it was one of the very first operational experiments. Farther in, a full page is devoted to ARISS and delves into details all about the program.  Another full page describes some of ARISS’s major metrics for US schools.  A selection of other ARISS metrics is sprinkled throughout the report. The link for downloading the report is: https://www.issnationallab.org/research-on-the-iss/reports/20-years-of-student-experiments-using-the-iss/

• November 14:  SCaN, JPL, and ARISS put together a presentation that was given at the Classroom in the Sky virtual event.  ARISS-US Education Committee member Melissa Pore represented ARISS. Attendees at this session totaled 35, with 75 more educators having registered to watch the recorded session. The “STEMinar” attracted educators from around the world to learn about teaching strategies and tools for many areas of STEM and/or aerospace and the related careers.

• November 16: ARISS volunteer Charlie Sufana gave a special presentation via Zoom to the Lake County Amateur Radio Club (LCARC) in Lake County, Indiana. This group supported the very first ARISS contact, which was carried out December 21, 2020 at the Luther Burbank School. Sufana surprised club members, honoring them with a wide variety of photos and facts from their having supported over the years many Shuttle Amateur Radio EXperiment contacts and ARISS contacts. 12 LCARC members were social distanced at the clubhouse for his talk while 4 others attended virtually.  Others members watched the recording.

• November 22: Charlie Sufana set up a second Zoom meeting, this one as a reunion to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of the first ARISS school contact ever made, which was at the Luther Burbank School on December 21, 2020 in Burbank, IL.  Sufana had invited all students, faculty, and ARISS team members that he had contact information on, and asked them to invite other students they have kept touch with. Sufana showed the original contact video to the 24 attending the Zoom reunion. Attending the Zoom reunion were students who made the contact, students who supported the contact (e.g. generated questions), teachers, ham volunteers, and family members. Here are notes and quotes:
• After the contact, at least 3 adults who attended went on to earn their ham licenses, including lead teacher, Rita Wright.
• The reunion and the showing of the contact video elicited many emotions—some choked up while talking and tears flowing down several members’ faces.
• Principal Bob Mocek said the ARISS event at Burbank 20 years ago “Was the best thing he ever did as an educator in his 40 years in education.”
• Student Brittany Lukasik had been in first grade, the youngest student to ask astronaut Bill Shepherd a question.  Brittany and her Mom attended the reunion.  Her mom said that prior to the try-outs to be selected for asking questions, Brittany really wanted to do this and was motivated to get her voice booming, through coaching and determination. Britanny said, “The ARISS experience influenced my life.”  She received her B.S. degree in Nursing and is now a nurse in Florida.
• Teacher Maureen O’Brien stated that, “We did so much in the classroom leading up to the contact.  We were given the creative freedom to develop lessons based on our grade level and subject matter.  The teachers were engaged at all grade levels (K-8) and all study subjects.”
• Teacher Susan McNichols said: “I pulled out the scrapbook on the Burbank ARISS experience and I still get emotional about it 20 years later.”  In 2012, Susan organized an ARISS contact for the Liberty Junior High School with astronaut Don Petit.
• Many students attending the reunion are now in STEAM careers and Sufana made a record of these. Several of the students moved to the Space Coast and work there as a CPA, nurse, insurance broker, and as a government contracts specialist for the Navy.

• November 12-13: The lead article in the widely circulated southern Maine newspaper, The Weekly Sentinel, touted the upcoming ARISS radio contact in January for Sea Road School in Kennebunk, Maine. The school serves over 300 third, fourth, and fifth-grade students and the article described the students’ STEM- and radio-related preparatory lessons. The link is: http://www.theweeklysentinel.com/
• A second media outlet highlighted the Sea Road School, also. The Seacoast Online news publication’s article titled “Sea Road Students to Radio Orbiting Astronauts” described students’ growing excitement for their upcoming contact. The story covered the celebration of ARISS’s 20 years of successes on the ISS, as well.  The article is at: https://www.seacoastonline.com/story/lifestyle/2020/11/11/sea-road-students-radio-orbiting-astronauts/6251386002/

• November 16: ARISS team member Darrell Warren gave a presentation to Red Hill Lutheran School faculty in Tustin, CA. The teachers are interested in hosting an ARISS contact in the future and 25 of them attended the meeting, along with the principal and 3 staff members.  Warren, a retired schoolteacher, stressed that ARISS-related topics can engage every student in the school in hands-on activities and can involve all subjects. He gave examples of how to do this. He said, “My experience with students is that most are more than excited even when listening to other schools’ ARISS contacts, once they understand a real astronaut is flying across the sky during the contact. Especially if the listening youth are holding radios and manipulating antennas.”

• November 13:  A WBNG-TV team in Binghamton taped a video and posted a story that related ARISS activities to the SpaceX November 15th launch.  The news team had gone to Kopernik Observatory and Science Center in Vestal, NY to interview the head of the Center, ARISS educator Drew Deskur, about the Binghamton area’s ties to space.  Deskur talked about Kopernik’s involvement with ARISS, related education activities, and ham radio.https://wbng.com/2020/11/13/kopernik-reacts-to-spacex-launch/

         Upcoming Events

• December 3: Amur State University students in Blagoveshchensk, Russia will take part in an ARISS contact with Sergey Ryzhikov.

• December 4: Students at Scuola Secondaria di l grado Anna Frank in Pistoia, Italy are ready for their ARISS contact with Victor Glover.

• December 4: Tecumseh High School students, especially those in the Electronics and Amateur Radio Class and the area’s STEAM Center in Tecumseh, OK are well prepared for their ARISS contact with Shannon Walker.

• December 9: Amur State University students in Blagoveshchensk, Russia will take part in an ARISS contact with Sergey Kud-Sverchkov.