Message to US Educators

January 24: Students at Istituto Comprensivo Anna Rita Sidoti in Gioiosa Marea, Italy shared an exciting day as their peers talked with Axiom crew 3’s Walter Villadei during an ARISS contact; he answered 14 student questions. The event began with a pre-contact show including students’ talks, videos of Villadei and astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, and an ESA crew training video. The event drew 90 students and others, and 700 more students watched the livestream in their classrooms. In 2 days’ time, the video garnered 3.8k views. The school had engaged all students in lessons preparing them for this ARISS contact and support came from ham radio operators from the national organization for amateur radio, Italian Radioamateur Associacion. News services on hand consisted of RAI3 TV, Canale Sicilia TV, and Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Assocata Press Agency.

January 13: ARISS volunteers Martha Muir and Jim Reed spent the day at TechFest in Lawrenceville, GA put on by Gwinnett Amateur Radio Society. The event serves the amateur radio community with how-to workshops and demonstrations of various ham radio modes and of the latest ham radio equipment. Martha and Jim staffed a table displaying the new ARISS SPARKI radio kit and other items for teachers and handed out flyers describing ARISS and the 40-year celebrations in February at Kennedy Space Center.  The 127 attendees they spoke with included 12 teachers, 16 students, and 15 others who wanted flyers to bring home to family members who are teachers.

January 22: ARISS was honored by being chosen as the ISS National Lab’s Space Station Explorers Partner of the Month. The ISS National Lab commended ARISS by posting an item on Facebook and X stating, “Congratulations to our friends at @ARISS int’l for being selected as our Partner of the Month! ARISS offers students around the world the exciting opportunity to talk with astronauts as they orbit 250 miles over Earth.”

January 22: Istituto Comprensivo Statale in Villa Guardia, Italy hosted an ARISS radio contact with Axiom astronaut Walter Villadei.  He answered 10 students’ questions while 150 students and teachers watched the action. Two newspapers covered the contact and a livestream was offered, which garnered 1.2k views in 4 days’ time. The URL is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMQUWMww9yE.  This education institution supports 3 primary schools for students, age 6 to 10, and 2 middle schools for students, age 11 to 13. A teaching team provides theoretical and practical teaching of science and technology.

January 19-20: At the annual Cowtown Hamfest, a gathering of 1,000 radio enthusiasts of the Dallas/Forest Hill, TX area this year, saw an ARISS display and heard ARISS Director of Engineering Randy Berger promote ARISS. He set up an exhibit and led a forum that attracted 30 people. He explained the ARISS program and some of its current projects and future endeavors, including ARISS’ ideas toward Lunar ham communications. Randy reported over 300 visitors coming to his exhibit table.

ARISS Upcoming Events  

Jan 31: Bandırma Şehit Güvenç Anatolian HS, Bandırma, Türkiye-ARISS contact, ARISS-Europe Team
Jan 31: Bilingual Montessori School-Lund, Stiftelsen, Lund, Sweden-ARISS contact, ARISS-Europe Team
Feb 1: Alabama School of Cyber Technology & Engineering Huntsville-ARISS contact, ARISS-US Team
Feb 2: Thrive Home School Academy, Colorado Springs CO-ARISS contact, ARISS-US Team
Feb 22-24: Human Spaceflight Amateur Radio: 40th Anniversary Celebration, KSC Center for Space Education, Titusville FL—ARISS conference/gala

January 15: HamCation in Orlando, FL, the second largest annual ham radio convention in the US, gives awards that honor outstanding ham radio operators. The 2024 Gordon West Ambassador of the Year winners are ARISS volunteers Fred and Anita Kemmerer of Hollis, NH. The two, recognized nationally for promoting technology learning and amateur radio, developed technical educational activities for youth and for ham operators as lifelong learners wanting to try new modes of radio communications.  Fred, an ARISS Technical Mentor, has assisted 20 schools in the preparations for their ARISS contact. He and Anita help guide these schools’ students, also, in electronics and communications hands-on activities.  

January 15: ARISS volunteer Charlie Sufana met with 10 students and the Dean of the College of Engineering at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, FL. Charlie serves as the ARISS Technical Mentor for the school’s ARISS contact scheduled in April. He and the undergrads reviewed progress on getting all the equipment needed for their contact’s radio set-up. He talked to them also about a number of education and technical aspects of the ARISS program beyond school radio contacts. In the evening, he presented a talk on ARISS to the Daytona Beach Amateur Radio Club. Attendance totaled 25 people, including 3 youth.  

January 7: ARISS opened a window to accept ARISS Education Proposals from education groups hoping to host an ARISS radio contact. The window closes on February 29.  The ARISS contacts would be held between July 1 and December 31, 2024. ARISS distributed a news release about the window opening and media outlets picked up the information. ARISS sent a detailed blurb to NASA EXPRESS, which went to 60,624 subscribers and was shared through the NASA Office of STEM Engagement social media tools; these efforts resulted in shared content going to over 1 million followers.

ARISS Upcoming Events
Jan 24: IC Istituto Comprensivo, Gioiosa Marea, Italy-ARISS contact, ARISS-Europe Team
Jan 25: Youth Group, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia—ARISS contact, ARISS-Russia Team
Jan 29: Ömer Cemile Güler Imam Hatip School, Selçuklu, Türkiye-ARISS contact, ARISS-Europe Team
Jan 31: Bandırma Şehit Güvenç Anatolian HS, Bandırma, Türkiye-ARISS contact, ARISS-Europe Team
Jan 31: Bilingual Montessori School-Lund, Stiftelsen, Lund, Sweden-ARISS contact, ARISS-Europe Team
Feb 22-24: Human Spaceflight Amateur Radio: 40^th Anniversary Celebration, KSC Ctr for Space Education, Titusville FL—ARISS conference/gala, ARISS-I Team

January 11: ARISS-USA leaders Executive Director Frank Bauer and Director of Education Tanya Anderson gave a talk in an education workshop at the 2024 AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) Science and Technology Forum and Exposition in Orlando, FL. The professional development presentation to K-12 STEM educators and AIAA members featured ARISS 2.0—New Vision for Inspiring and Educating the Next Generation. In addition to the school radio contacts with astronauts that ARISS is known for, Frank and Tanya described the ARISS SPARKI Kit and demonstrated some of its education tools that teachers use in classrooms. The kit helps introduce students to space, electronics, and radio. Frank and Tanya discussed ARISS STEM initiatives with their goal of allowing students to interact with educational experiments to be launched on the ISS.  The AIAA workshop coordinator said: “It was fantastic to hear firsthand about the great opportunities and the world you’re opening up through ARISS, for teachers and students.”  ARISS educator Jackie Blumer, host of a 2011 ARISS contact at Greenville (IL) Elementary School, also gave a workshop talk: “Limitless Horizons: Unveiling Opportunities in Aerospace Education.”  

January 4: ARISS volunteer Dave Jordan presented a talk about the ARISS program to the Lake Monroe Amateur Radio Society (LMARS) in Winter Springs, FL. He opened the presentation explaining to 35 members—including some educators–that ARISS connects students with astronauts on the ISS via ham radio and he conveyed how schools get chosen for the contacts through a competitive education proposal process. He told new LMARS members that the club mentored five schools and two children’s hospitals with their ARISS contacts. He ended his talk by showing charts about ARISS’ upcoming 40-year anniversary conference, Celebrating the Positive Impact of Amateur Radio on Human Spaceflight, in February at Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex.  

January 9: ARISS announced that Will Marchant was appointed by Frank Bauer to be Director of Operations for ARISS-USA. Will, a dedicated ARISS team mate, supported ARISS and SAREX for over 30 years in many different roles, such as Technical Mentor, first ARISS Operations Leader, and since its inception, the ARISS SSTV Gallery where space enthusiasts post ARISS SSTV images they download from the ISS (https://www.spaceflightsoftware.com/ARISS_SSTV/). He retired recently from a stellar aerospace career and continues to inspire students in STEM by being an advocate of events where among other things, kids launch rockets, such as the NASA Student Launch program, and he’s a Civil Air Patrol Aerospace Education Member. Recently, he engaged a school visiting the Winchester (VA) STARBASE Academy for its Department of Defense STEM program that aims to engage “our nation’s at-risk youth” in inquiry-based hands-on STEM.

ARISS Upcoming Events  
Jan 22: IC Statale Villa Guardia, Villa Guardia Italy-ARISS contact, ARISS-Europe Team
Jan 24: IC Istituto Comprensivo, Gioiosa Marea, Italy-ARISS contact, ARISS-Europe Team
Feb 22 – 24: Human Spaceflight Amateur Radio: 40^th Anniversary Celebration, KSC Ctr for Space Education, Titusville FL—ARISS conference/gala, ARISS-I Team

January 3: ARISS-International Chair Frank Bauer gave a presentation during the bi-weekly Ham Radio Crash Course – HamNation online ham radio podcast. He explained many exciting aspects of the upcoming 40th Anniversary Conference: Celebrating the Positive Impact of Amateur Radio on Human Spaceflight to be held at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex from February 22 – 24. He expounded on the earliest history of use of ham radio on space vehicles (1983, by astronaut Owen Garriott on STS-9) and invited listeners to go to the ARISS web site to register to attend the celebration events. Frank mentioned that nearly 1,600 ARISS school radio contacts have now taken place. For the remainder of the presentation, he handled a Q & A session. Listeners totaled 356, and in 3 days’ time, 3.9K…and that will keep increasing!

January 4-5:  Last week’s report covered Harbor Creek High School’s ARISS contact; here is a happy update. An NBC TODAY Show producer had spotted a late-November article about ARISS, carried on the NASA Space Station Research web page, which included Rosalie White’s email address. The NBC producer contacted Rosalie about doing an ARISS story, and learned all about ARISS and the Harbor Creek School’s ARISS-related activities. An NBC team including Harry Smith traveled to the school the day before their ARISS contact and spent much of two days taping. NBC ran promos, then aired Harry’s 6.5-minute live segment, and offered a YouTube and social media posts. ARISS continues to collect statistics, but the average audience of TODAY Show live segments is 2.5M and around that many more people will see local NBC stations’ clips in addition to other folks viewing social posts—and ARISS’ social posts. In just 30 hours’ time, NBC’s X post had captured 37.6K views! Andreas Mogensen saw a post and re-tweeted (garnering over 5K views), adding: “Wow. How great for me to see behind the scenes of a recent ARISS radio contact.” The TODAY Show segment is at:

https://www.today.com/video/high-school-students-use-ham-radio-skills-to-contact-space-station-201408581756

January 2: NASA released its 2024 International Space Station Calendar with its outstanding photos and fascinating facts about the ISS. The final page featured a set of URLs for people to click to learn more. ARISS felt honored that when people click some of the links, they will find stories featuring, among other things, an ARISS radio contact supported by Chris Hadfield, the MarconISSta ham radio spectrum research project that ARISS partnered on, small satellites built by ARISS students at Kursk University, and an ARISS contact that involved hundreds of students networked together from 12 Central American countries.

December 27-30: An ARISS Slow Scan TV (SSTV—picture downlinks) experiment took place, resulting in many thrilled participants; they had waited since the last SSTV session in October.  The experiment offered downlinks on several days during limited passes and on a different radio frequency than usual. The event employed the ARISS voice repeater system in the Columbus Module rather than the Service Module’s SSTV system. The ARISS team declared the experiment a success; 481 unique participants downloaded and posted 992 images in the ARISS SSTV Gallery at https://www.spaceflightsoftware.com/ARISS_SSTV/.  Of the 481 participants, 112 answered the survey saying they were educators and 28 answered that they were individual students. One participant wrote, “A great thank you for this SSTV event!”

December 29: The online ham radio news podcast Amateur Radio Newsline carried a report featuring February’s ARISS 40-year anniversary conference titled “Celebrating the Positive Impact of Amateur Radio on Human Spaceflight.”  The reporter gave a call out that ARISS wants to receive stories or videos of stories from teachers and students who engaged in an ARISS school contact—stories about the effect the radio contact made on their lives. The report ended with a quote from ARISS: “The historic 40th anniversary conference will be a retrospective of what has been accomplished and will highlight our exciting amateur radio human spaceflight plans on the horizon.”

December Social Media metrics  

ARISS social media leader Jim Reed reported December Social Media highlights:

• 3rd month in 2023 that ARISS had over 500,000 Impressions
• highest monthly 2023 engagements—20.8K Engagements (next highest had been 18.6K)
• Video leveraged for ARISS’s set of STS-9 posts—during December, 28.6K clip views & nearly 5K minutes watched across X, FB, Instagram
• YouTube Live Event of Richard Garriott—nearly 400 views and 38.2 Watch Hours
• 2023 Follower growth—terrific; added 6.2K Followers (23.6%) to our feeds

December Total Impressions and Total Interactions/Engagements

Nearly all numbers doubled from last month–      

• ARISS X – Total Impressions / Views 372,958,  Interactions / Engagements  13,881 
• ARISS Facebook – Total Impressions / Views 340,847,  Interactions / Engagements 8,446
• ARISS Total New Followers across platforms 1,120
• ARISS LinkedIn – Total Impressions 230,  Reactions 10
• ARISS YouTube – Total subscribers increased to 2,080
• ARISS Web Pages – Unique Visits 26,203, Page Views 90,193

December Top Posts

Top X post (26,711 Impressions, 166 Engagements) about NASA’s story on ARISS’ 40-Year Celebrations

Top Facebook post (70,607 Impressions, 883 Engagements) about 1983 video of Astronaut Owen Garriott explaining the STS-9 onboard ham radio station

ARISS Upcoming Events  
Potential late Jan. schedule: ARISS contacts supported by Axiom-3 crew members, ARISS-Europe Team
February 22-24, 2024: Human Spaceflight Amateur Radio: 40^th Anniversary Celebration, KSC Center for Space Education, Titusville FL—ARISS conference & gala, ARISS-I Team

December 14:  The Primary School of Zipari in the coastal town of Kos, Greece hosted an ARISS contact with Andreas Mogensen, who answered 15 students’ questions. The event, attended by 300 students and community members, had reps on hand from a national TV station and an area newspaper to cover the event.  Four students starred in a pre-contact YouTube seen by 319 people (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0-72F6roYk) and in excited voices, they described their STEM studies and their enthusiasm about talking to Mogensen. The school posted two more videos about student STEM studies, one on space travel and the ISS and one on life in space. 

December 11-12: Students still enthralled over their October ARISS contact at St Peter-in-Thanet Junior School in Broadstairs, UK, wanted to take part in a Great Britain Youth on the Air amateur radio activity. The area ham club, Hilderstone Radio Society organized two days at the school for 70 children, age 7 to 11, guiding them in using 3 portable ham radio stations. The boys and girls liked knowing their voices carried across The Channel to France, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and more distant countries. They learned about tuning the radio to hear voices of ham operators and tones transmitted by Morse code, and that those tones communicated words one letter at a time. The youth gave their name, age, and a radio signal report (clarity and volume). The club awarded each student a special certificate celebrating their achievement of speaking on the air waves. The science teacher said “student enthusiasm, which was ‘off the charts’, inspired faculty to offer a new course in 2024, the Magic of Radio.”

December 11: Students of Harbor Creek School in Harborcreek, PA, engaged in an ARISS contact with Andreas Mogensen, who answered 13 questions. 500 students, teachers, and community members watched the action and also the pre-contact programing that was carried out by three students belonging to the Advanced Technology Group. They educated the audience about Mogensen’s career and space-related topics. 181 people watched the livestream and within 1 day, 930 more had watched a recording. Reporters came from MSN.com, Fox, Erie News Now, YourErie.com, RFGlobal.net, and the NBC Today Show. The latter recorded student interviews, visited the school ham radio station, and climbed a ladder to get on the roof to view the radio antennas! NBC will run a special story in early 2024. The RFGlobal.net reporter wrote that he witnessed a “goose bump moment” when students’ faces showed relief at hearing Mogensen’s voice and parents made “audible gasps followed by giving a standing ovation.” Students had been supported by the Wattsburg Wireless Association Amateur Radio Club who helped youth and parents learn about space technologies and satellite communications.

December 7:  The ARISS team planned and hosted a special YouTube webinar of Space Flight Participant Richard Garriott. Frank Bauer interviewed Richard about his father, Owen Garriott, who in 1983 was the first astronaut to take ham radio on a space vehicle. ARISS set up the webinar as one of many events that honor the impact of 40 years of ham radio on spacecraft. After NASA had agreed to Owen using the radio, it allowed many people to talk with an orbiting crew member instead of only Mission Control or a head of state. Bauer asked Richard to describe some activities he did during his time on the ISS, including handling many ARISS educational radio contacts and special radio work. In 14 days, the webinar garnered 660 views. The URL is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys0Jjn40Y_A.

December 20: In the front pages of the January 2024 issue of the American Radio Relay League’s (ARRL) monthly journal, an article ran about Sunita Williams. It touched on aspects of her career track such as the US Naval Academy, becoming a helicopter pilot, and test pilot. She said meeting John Young influenced her to want to become a career astronaut. One third of the article was devoted to her experience carrying out ARISS contacts with students, and she said she relished those interactions. In showing her desire to make each contact very special to students, Sunita said, “It’s a skill to talk fast to get to the point [to answer their questions] and it’s important to relay the kid’s name and [say] thank you.”

December 26: ARISS announced the education organizations selected to host ARISS school contacts with ISS crew members in July through December 2024. Six organizations’ ARISS Education Proposals were chosen and the groups will proceed in creating an equipment plan for the radio station they will use to talk with their assigned astronaut. Once a school’s plan has been approved, the group will be scheduled for the ARISS contact based on ability to match with NASA crew schedule opportunities. 

ARISS Upcoming Events

Potential late Jan. schedule: ARISS contacts supported by Axiom-3 crew members, ARISS-Europe Team
February 22-24, 2024: Human Spaceflight Amateur Radio: 40^th Anniversary Celebration, KSC Center for Space Education, Titusville FL—ARISS conference & gala, ARISS-I Team