• August: ARISS educator Drew Deskur, head of the Kopernik Observatory and Science Center in Vestal, NY, planned several social-distanced summer STEM youth camps for various ages that had lessons tied to ARISS.  Youth aged 8 and 9 got to try coding, build and program robots, learn about ARISS, and engineer differing solutions to problems.  Youth studied a bit about astronomy, as well. After learning some electrical principles, circuit design and safety rules, middle-school-age youth worked with multi-meters and soldering irons to build electronic-kit projects.
  

 

• September 3: ARISS thanks the NASA team for Kathryn Lueders’ (Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate) posting on LinkedIn about the ARISS program.  The ARISS team distributed a news release about the LinkedIn item and 9 e-news outlets--some national, some regional including several ARRL web sites--picked up the release for thousands to read. ARISS further amplified the LinkedIn post by including the story on the ARISS-USA web page and ARISS-International web page. A week after the NASA item was posted, LinkedIn Reactions totaled 97.

 
         Upcoming Events

• Sep 21 Children’s National Hospital, Washington DC ARISS contact, ARISS US team
  
• Sep 24 SPDW Voortrekker Movement, Oranjeville, S. Africa ARISS contact, ARISS Europe team
  

 Twitter: On July 31, 2021, ARISS Twitter followers totaled 15,093, a gain of nearly 1% over June.

Instagram: As of July 31, 2021, Instagram Followers now total 342.

YouTube: As of July 31, 2021, YouTube subscribers topped 1,540.

ARISS Web Unique Pageviews:  37,073 in July.

         Upcoming Events

•  To be re-scheduled Notre Dame Jogakuin Jr Sr H.S., Kyoto, Japan ARISS contact         ARISS-Japan team
•  Aug 11  1st Ono Grp Hyogo Council Scout Assn, Ono, Japan ARISS contact                    ARISS-Japan team

• July 21: The SpaceKids Global (SKG) organization based in Winter Park, FL, in collaboration with the Girl Scouts of Citrus, in Orlando held an ARISS contact with Mark Vande Hei. SKG’s mission is to inspire girls and boys in STEAM+ (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, Math plus Environment) with a focus on empowering young girls. The two groups created a curriculum, Making Space for Girls, challenging girl scouts around the US with STEAM projects that began before, and continued through, Covid days with many activities carried out virtually. An example is a “Let’s Explore Space” event where girls from 14 states saw a demo of the new Unistellar EVscopes and heard guest speakers including a NASA software engineer and the VP of Programs and Partnerships at the ISS National Lab. For the ARISS contact, hundreds of youth tied in while 5 girl scouts and 13 leaders were on site. Many questions had been collected from 46 Girl Scout Councils nationwide; 20 questions were asked. The event was live streamed and a few days later had been viewed by over 480 people; it is at https://youtu.be/KzSRnjSjiTw. Each of the five interviewees received a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition from US Congressional Representative Val Demings.
  

• Month of June + July 7: ARISS volunteer Gordon Scannell and members of the Livonia (MI) Amateur Radio Club set up an exhibit for the month of June about ARISS and ham radio satellites at the Livonia Public Library. The display case contained a loaner CubeSat simulator procured from AMSAT, amateur radio brochures and books from ARRL, and ham radios and antennas.  The library staff then asked club members to present a talk to the community; the hams introduced CubeSats and ARISS to 20 attendees. Afterwards, the hams spoke to the library staff about hosting a future ARISS contact.
  

• July 22: Students at Seinan Gakuin Junior Senior High School in Fukuoka, Japan were given the chance through an ARISS radio contact to speak with Akihiko Hoshide. Some students were on site following Covid-19 guidelines and some joined by Zoom. As the ISS passed over the town, Hoshide answered 13 of their questions. A crowd of 152 were present for the contact. One TV news crew was on hand covering the event along with four newspaper teams. The event was livestreamed.     
  

• June 31: The Savannah River Academy faculty in Grovetown, GA was totally impressed with informal educator Rachel Samples Jones, who planned the ARISS educational "Ham101" program for students.  She had orchestrated nine hands-on STEAM lessons for many of the 3rd through 8th graders to prepare them for their upcoming ARISS contact. Rachel reported that a lot of the students’ parents had talked to the school faculty to request more of her activities for their children. So not only did the school adjust its special projects schedule to better fit Rachel’s own work schedule, but starting this fall every student in the school will take part in the “Ham 101” program.   
  

 
         Upcoming Events

• Aug 3    Notre Dame Jogakuin Jr & Sr High School, Kyoto, Japan, ARISS contact        ARISS-Japan team
  

• June 24: ARISS educator Gina Kwid and a co-teacher gave a presentation on ARISS and space transportation at i-STEM, an annual four-day professional development conference. PK-12 teachers apply to the Idaho STEM Action Center to be selected to attend i-STEM. Gina spoke about ARISS and her co-teacher spoke about Maker transportation activity. Viewers included 12 educators and 1 principal.
  

• June 21-30:  Youth from four California high schools attending the GearUp Tech Camp held at California State University, Fullerton, learned about ARISS and radio communications in space from ARISS educator Melissa Pore.  Students were ages 9 to 17 and educators were junior high and high school educators.  Pore employed hands-on activities for learning about radio signals, radio waves, codes sent via Morse code and light, SCaN’s Deep Space Network, satellites, different types of antennas and the advantages of each type, and guiding students in building mini-models of antennas and making bookmarks and monogram key chains with their names in Morse code. 
  

  

• July 8: Girl Scouts of Citrus (GS of Citrus) based in Orlando, Florida, in collaboration with Spacekids Global (SKG) and the ProXops company, has an ARISS contact the week of July 19. In preparation for the ARISS contact, GS of Citrus developed the Making Space For Girls program, utilizing hands-on STEAM activities to inspire regional and nationwide Girl Scout groups during the long months of COVID-19. Three of the many activities included:
  
• Send Postcards to Space--GS of Citrus partnered with Blue Origin’s For the Future in Space Engineering. 100 Girl Scouts from 17 states signed up to create ideas, designs, and discussions for new inventions, then drew their designs to be flown on a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket. Additionally, 37 adults received training, offering the program to their troops, leading to 380 more girls participating.
  
• Junior Ranger Spaceflight Explorer program by NASA and the National Park Service--GS of Citrus hosted 59 scouts and siblings in this girl-led program of interactive undertakings focused on space, leading to the completion of their Spaceflight Junior Ranger patch.
• Virgin Galactic presentations--CEOs of SKG and GS of Citrus, both Virgin Galactic astronauts, spoke to 150 Girl Scouts about their training and excitement for space.

 

• June 21 & 25: ARISS educator Melissa Pore gave two presentations to youth at the Milton Space Camp in Washington DC.  A total of 50 students of lower elementary school age and 10 elementary school educators learned all about space communications. The first presentation covered ARISS and amateur radio in space.  The second presentation was on how to build models of satellites.
  

 

• July 5: ARISS educator Micol Ivancic gave a presentation on the ARISS program to students of Corinaldesi-Padovano School in Senigallia, Italy. Attendees included 30 students ages 18 and 19, 14 educators, and 3 delegates from the European Erasmus “We Shape Our Future” student program. Ivancic spoke about ARISS voice and packet radio and demonstrated how the students can decode ARISS SSTV (picture) downlinks. She covered software defined radios and radio software apps.  
  

 

• July: Two teachers at schools in France that hosted ARISS contacts a few years ago wrote a script for a comic about ARISS. The teachers had joined the ARISS French Workgroup in 2019 to assist in selecting and preparing French schools for Thomas Pesquet's ESA Alpha Mission. The two teachers felt a comic could help schools understand how ARISS students learned about space communications, STEM, and ARISS. They worked with a graphic artist student and French ARISS team members and developed a three-part comic, a section for 1st to 3rd grade, 4th and 5th grade, and 6th to 9th grade. The comic was published and copyrighted and sent to ESA. CNES posted a long item on its web site about: the comic, ARISS program, and recent ARISS French school contacts. The web item titled "Hello ISS, Here are the French Students" is at https://missionalpha.cnes.fr/fr/mission-alpha/les-experiences-made-france/education.  The comic is at:  https://www.ariss-f.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/diffusion-BD-Sarah-Marie-Marie-Lydie.pdf 
  

         Upcoming Events

• July 14  camp at Southwest Technical State U., Kursk, Russia, ARISS contact, ARISS Russia team
  
• July 14  Youth On The Air-camp, Cincinnati OH, ARISS contact, ARISS-US team
• July 21  SpaceKids Global with Girl Scouts of Citrus, Winter Park FL, ARISS contact, ARISS-US team

• June 26: Students from French schools in three isolated villages engaged together in an ARISS radio contact with Thomas Pesquet, who answered 18 student questions. Schools were: Ecole de Bellême in Bellême, Pôle scolaire Igé/Le Gué de la Chaine in Belforêt en Perche and Ecole de Nocé in Perche en Nocé.  Students were social-distanced at school or conferenced in from home.  About 125 people were on site along with 75 students and teachers. The contact was livestreamed; within four days’ time, 1,733 people had viewed it. The URL is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK1lhT2VcSY. Media covering the event included Regional Newspaper Ouest-France, area FM station Radio-Intensité and Regional TV France-3.  

• May 24: The ARISS team received photos and metrics for the About Gagarin From Space event conducted with students of the House of Technical Creativity in Svetly in Saratov, Russia. Instructors assisted 20 youths in making radio contact with the ISS while parents and administrators watched. Pyotr Dubrov supported the ARISS contact tied to the learning event.

 

• June 17: Two French schools, the Collège Albert Camus in La Norville and the Université Paris-Saclay in Saint-Aubin, co-hosted an ARISS radio contact. Students talked with Thomas Pesquet who answered 19 questions. The radio contact was preceded by a three-hour special event moderated by the well-known dynamic French journalist and TV science presenter, Fred Courant. The audience of 450, mostly students, sat in an auditorium following area COVID guidelines. The show highlighted Thomas Pesquet’s life and background, and radio amateurs’ activities in an exciting way with a lot of multimedia; the audience responded enthusiastically. Three YouTube videos were offered for viewers and results showed viewer counts of 28,000 within 24 hours, and 42,000 within a week! Additionally, national BFM-TV and regional TV France 3 covered the radio contact as did regional newspaper, LeParisien.

 

• June 21- 26: ARISS SSTV (slow scan TV) sessions are broadly popular with worldwide space enthusiasts, educators, students, and radio experimenters who download images transmitted from the ARISS radio by the ISS crew. For June, ARISS-International team members planned and prepared a 5-day SSTV session featuring 12 images of amateur radio operations on the International Space Station, Mir, and Space Shuttle.  2,770 participants posted 11,776 of their downloaded images at the online ARISS SSTV Gallery for public viewing (see https://www.spaceflightsoftware.com/ARISS_SSTV/). Many then applied to receive a special ARISS certificate.

 

• June 22 – 25: The ARISS-International working group held its 2021 annual meeting virtually and 37 attended or listened to recorded sessions. Participants from 14 states and 8 countries saw presentations and got into lively discussions on future strategies, current and future education projects, on-orbit and future hardware, ongoing and new operations, Lunar Gateway, commercial space opportunities, and more. Team members from the US totalled 19.

 

• June 14: Following a spring ARISS radio contact, Estes Park Elementary School teachers and students told the ham club members who aided with their ARISS contact that they wanted to know more about amateur radio communications and its related technology. The ARISS Mentor has learned that the Estes Valley Amateur Radio Club set up a June class for teachers and students to experiment with ham radio activities, practice their radio communications skills, and learn material for the ham radio license test. The following people passed their FCC radio exams: five students, an elementary teacher, a middle school teacher, an IT staffer, and an adjunct educator.  The teachers will work together on elementary and middle school STEM classes this fall.

 

• June 21: ARISS volunteer Ruth Willet graduated summa cum laude from Kettering University with a double major in engineering physics and mechanical engineering and a minor in acoustics. She garnered Kettering’s President’s Medal for scholarship, leadership, and community involvement. Besides being an ARISS volunteer, she is co-host of the ARRL video produced for ARISS that depicts much about the program; the video is played at nearly all US ARISS school contacts.

 

• June 22: ARISS volunteer and educator Micol Ivancic learned she was selected to attend the ESA Teach with Space conference in July. Educators had to submit a classroom activity or project they did with their students. Ivancic provided a video of her school’s ARISS contact and a description of ARISS. The conference serves primary and secondary teachers and programs are designed to provide activities and online tools related to space themes and STEM learning. Ivanic said, “I am excited! At the conference, some submitted projects will be highlighted.”

ARISS Social Media
 

• Facebook – June 2021
  

• Twitter: On June 30, 2021, ARISS Twitter followers totaled 14966, a gain of nearly 2% over May.
  
• Instagram: As of June 30, 2021, Instagram Followers now total 337.
• YouTube: As of June 30, 2021, YouTube subscribers topped 1,521.
• ARISS Web Unique Pageviews: 181,209 in June, a spike due to posting details on an upcoming ARISS SSTV session

Top performing Tweet in June
17.6K Impressions

Highest Facebook Reach in June
12,096 People Reached, 845 Engagements

• June 10: St Joseph’s Primary School in Bombala, NSW, Australia, hosted an ARISS contact with Shane Kimbrough. A group of 124 parents, friends, students, and teachers watched the event, which was livestreamed, although the count of viewers is not yet available. The Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC Radio National) and an area newspaper interviewed St Joseph’s Primary School Principal Susan Tighe and then aired and posted stories. The ARISS Technical Mentor commented that he had received a telephone call from Ms. Tighe who sincerely thanked the ARISS international team of volunteers for such a wonderful opportunity for the students, and stated that the audio quality of the ARISS radio contact was “amazing.”  A very young student, Essie, printed a four-sentence letter to her teacher that included this statement: “I am going to be an Adnoot [astronaut].”
  

• June 14: Sterling Middle School in Sterling, VA hosted a recent ARISS contact and decided to create a video commemoration of their experiences revolving around the contact. The faculty produced the video to highlight educational projects tied to the ARISS contact that students engaged in (such as launching and tracking a medium altitude balloon), to honor all the students who spoke with Shannon Walker, and to thank sponsors, including NASA. In addition to the youth from Sterling Middle School involved in the learning activities, students from Sterling Elementary School and Guilford Elementary School had been involved in studies and were invited to ask questions during the ARISS contact; they were honored in the video, also. The 3.5-minute video is at: https://www.lcps.org/Page/236758.

 

• June 9-10: A follow-up of last week’s Moscow Aviation Institute’s downlinked Slow Scan TV session shows an increase in the number of participants. Each image submitted must be reviewed before final posting to the ARISS SSTV Gallery for the public to see – the URL is https://www.spaceflightsoftware.com/ARISS_SSTV/ – so the total number of people downloading images is difficult to know until a few days after the session. The number of space enthusiasts, educators, students, shortwave listeners, and ham operators in Russia, Europe, South America and North America who downloaded images totaled 558. They submitted 1,662 images they received.

 

• June 11 – 12: Three ARISS-Russia radio contacts were scheduled the past week. On June 12, one contact was conducted under the Gagarin From Space education initiative and was for students from the cities of Great Ustyug and Velikiy Ustyug in the Vologda Oblast of Russia. An ARISS contact was to be held for students in Lipetsk, Russia, but ARISS-Russia reported the contact was unsuccessful, and a third ARISS contact was removed from the schedule.

          Upcoming Events

• June 17 Collège A. Camus & U. Paris-Saclay, La Norville & St. Aubin, France; ARISS-Europe team
  
• June 21-26 ARISS SSTV Session; ARISS-International
• June 22-25 ARISS-International Annual worldwide meeting; ARISS-International      
• June 25       Ecole de Bellême, Pôle scolaire Igé/Gué de la Chaine, & Ecole de Nocé, Bellême, Belforêt en Perche & Perche en Nocé, France, ARISS contact; ARISS-Europe team