• June 1: ARISS educator Joanne Michael had challenged Space Station Explorer educators to a balloon race with tracking done via amateur radio payloads. The exciting distance-learning race, the Mid-Altitude Balloon Race, saw four educators successfully launch balloons simultaneously from Torrance, Berkeley, and Pasadena, CA and Pasco, WA. Over 435 socially-distanced students, teachers, and the public worldwide watched the livestreamed launch and first 4 minutes of competition at https://youtu.be/UD-rO3nKMZo/. Some began the graphing and predicting lessons found at https://www.ariss.org/mid-altitude-balloon-race.html for the balloon to reach the Eastern Time zone first to win.  Watch for more details in next week’s report. 
  

 

• The post to follow the racing was at www.ariss.org and ARISS social media…and in a mere 16 hours, interest soared!  ARISS Facebook showed 6,424 Reaches, 666 Engagements, 40 Shares, and 42 Likes. A teacher, Courtney, was inspired after reading the post to want a launch for her school; she wrote to readers, “Let’s get planning and get your thoughts and ideas and let’s make this happen for the students.”
  

• May 21: River Ridge High School in New Port Richey, FL hosted their ARISS contact in March. Teacher Linda Nowicki led students in a multitude of STEAM activities, as her ARISS proposal had promised. Now, she engages students in e-lessons on space. They learned to calculate orbital planes and the energy required to change orbits. They researched uncrewed space systems. One project had students determine the next two sightings of the ISS at their homes and record a) where they would view it from, b) what direction it would approach, and c) a sketch of their yard and house indicating potential obstructions preventing their observations. Linda saw such a worth in ARISS activities that she will continue lessons in the next school year. She was invited recently to become a member of the ARISS-US Education Committee.
  

• May 22: Frank Bauer gave a Zoom talk to space enthusiasts, students, educators and others on the program Magnitude Live #13, sponsored by Magnitude.io, a Space Station Explorers program located in Berkeley, CA.  Frank provided an overview of amateur radio and ARISS and gave examples of how amateur radio impacted his space career. He also explained the new social-distance distance-learning ARISS contacts, and the balloon race led by ARISS teacher Joanne Michael, with Magnitude.io as a contestant.  The presentation was also live-streamed on Magnitude.io’s YouTube Channel; 17 people listened via Zoom and 127 via the YouTube.
  

 
 
          ARISS Upcoming Events      

• TBD
  

 

• May 15: Young members of the Airdrie Space Science Club in Airdrie, AB, Canada engaged in a successful ARISS Multipoint Telebridge Contact via Amateur Radio with Chris Cassidy. The youth tied into the radio contact from homes via phone conference. Chris at the ARISS ham station mic answered all 14 student questions. A newly-vetted ARISS telebridge radio station was operated by an ARISS volunteer in South Africa. The new ARISS YouTube channel streamed the contact, garnering 200 live views.  After the contact, another 943 watched; it is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mflSlShPHA. The youth had focused on learning about space and radio communications and launching rockets and balloons that utilize ham radio for tracking. A club co-founder and teacher wrote: “During this pandemic, our opportunities to develop the kids’ interests in space have been interrupted. Looking forward to this ARISS contact has gotten them staring up toward the sky and imaging themselves as an astronaut one day.” A student’s father said, “We have a very ecstatic young man here.”  ARISS distributed a news release prior to this second test. Four ARISS sponsors augmented the effort. Thanks goes to SCaN for its Social Media posts about the contact.  ISS National Lab emailed the release to its 33 Space Station Explorers programs. AMSAT posted details in its weekly online news. ARRL provided stats on its activity: their web news item saw 258 unique pageviews, a story ran in their weekly e-letter (109,000 subscribers), and a Facebook post about the livestream reached 2,500 people with 73 people clicking on the YouTube, many sharing with their local ham clubs.
  

• May 8:  An ARISS-Europe team member worked with a regional branch of Poland’s national ham radio society, the Polish Amateur Radio Union, to develop a 40-minute Zoom program on ARISS for Polish students.  The event was livestreamed and covered how ARISS contacts work during the pandemic and how students engage in ARISS activities from home. The YouTube video was played of the recent ARISS contact for the Northern Virginia Students Group in Woodbridge, VA.  A guest speaker, teacher Micol Ivancic who is an ARISS team member, tied in to describe ARISS hands-on activities. She introduced the ESA education mascot, Paxi, who had starred in an online ESA lesson about ARISS. Zoom attendees totaled 20 students, teachers, and principals from 4 schools. Some of the teachers have begun working on plans for winning an ARISS contact.
  

         ARISS Upcoming Events      

• May 20: Rosalie White will present a Zoom program on ARISS to the Experimental Aircraft Association’s Chapter 1314 in Keene, NH.
  

 

• June 2: A mid-altitude balloon will launch from Los Angeles, CA and another from San Francisco in a race to determine the one reaching the Eastern Time Zone first.  Students at home around the world can track the balloons using ARISS’s online lessons developed by ARISS teachers.

May 6: ARISS teacher Joanne Michael and her students in Los Angeles, CA enjoy balloon launches.  She recently challenged educators at Magnitude.io (a Space Station Explorers program, like ARISS) in San Francisco to an intercontinental mid-altitude balloon race--and this week they set June 2 as the launch date. They have developed lessons for students around the globe to receive and track data from the APRS payload. ARISS now has an area on the ARISS website for lessons, and they are posted. Teachers and parents can excite at-home youth to engage in the race. The URL is: https://www.ariss.org/mid-altitude-balloon-race.html

March-May:  Girls and boys in the Airdrie Space Science Club enjoyed many hands-on STEM lessons in the months before lockdown in Airdrie, AB, Canada. Students are now excited about STEM again because they have a scheduled ARISS contact with Chris Cassidy. They will be at their homes and the contact will be the second test of ARISS’s new distance-learning style Multipoint Telebridge Contact via Amateur Radio using a brand new ARISS telebridge ground station. The main focus of the club is to build and launch rockets and balloons, most with ham radio payloads. One of the club’s founders wrote, “Our club is always looking at the history of rocketry and space travel. ARISS gives kids a chance to learn about space history as it happens over their heads.” The other club’s founder said, “I have an amateur radio station in my classroom. I look forward to the day when the club members can come back and enjoy working on their radio skills and develop their own interests in communications.”  
February 24: ARISS learned recently that a presentation was given by ARISS volunteer Will Marchant to students and faculty at the Chelsea Academy in Front Royal, VA. His visit was shortly before the school shutdown; the school enrolls students in 4th to 12th grade.  Will explained ARISS and then helped them listen to the ARISS contact for Kittredge Magnet School in Atlanta, GA. The Virginia students were very interested and teachers learned about ARISS-related STEM activities. One teacher asked where to find information on submitting a proposal for an ARISS contact in the future. 
May 1:  Rosalie White gave a talk on ARISS at a Zoom-based Bloomington (IN) Amateur Radio Club meeting. She described how and why the new Multipoint Telebridge Contact via Amateur Radio was developed. Club members heard about the successful first test of the new style ARISS contact with students in their homes in Virginia on April 30. The club continues to be very supportive of ARISS.

• April 30: The Northern Virginia Students group in Woodbridge, VA of kindergarten through fifth graders took part in an ARISS radio experiment with Chris Cassidy on the ISS.  The radio contact was the first ARISS test of a new method allowing the continuation of school contacts in the COVID era. For this Multipoint Telebridge Contact via Amateur Radio, students used computers in their homes to join the radio contact with the ARISS ISS ham station and an ARISS volunteer at his telebridge radio ground station. This test saw initial difficulties but with fast work by Chris and the ARISS team, he answered 5 students’ questions. The morning events were livestreamed for the public—365 views (2,003 more, afterwards) on the new ARISS YouTube Channel set up by the team. The URL is: https://youtu.be/Cu8I9ose4Vo. There wasn’t time for two brothers to ask their questions but during troubleshooting, Chris voiced their questions from his list and replied. Afterward, the boys were asked if they would like to write a letter to NASA about the experiment; they were thrilled, even more so while being videotaped reading their letter aloud. The short but very fun video is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YdnHN3ROh0&feature=youtu.beA.
  

 

• At last count, ARISS news release’s information was carried by over 91 web and Social Media sites worldwide, including ScaN, and also was celebrated during an ISS National Lab webinar. The new ARISS YouTube Channel already has 101 subscribers. Two of many curriculum activities for students leading up to the radio contact included learning an astronaut’s typical duty schedule, using APRS downlinked telemetry to track a balloon launch, and downloading ARISS SSTV images.
  

• April 26: Upper grade-level students in the KMO Kolska Wyspa schools in Kolo, Poland have a future ARISS contact. The past few weeks they have studied e-lessons oriented to space science. They had a virtual class on orbital velocity of the Moon around the Earth and about the relation to altitude and orbital period. They learned one of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's long-ago lessons on stages of rockets. For students who wanted more, they investigated rocket acceleration during the start of the first stage. Similar lessons will continue.
  

• April: Prior to pivoting to e-teaching, ARISS teacher Melissa Pore had engaged her Arlington, VA Bishop O’Connell High School classes in hands-on learning with the AMSAT CubeSat Simulator software defined radio, working with satellite telemetry. This week their Zoom class taught them to use a telemetry decoder software program for future science experiments. These will include calculating orbit needs in respect to a mission, such as a solar panel budget analysis.
  

ARISS Social Media
 
Facebook in April 2020

Twitter: At the end of April 2020, ARISS Twitter followers totaled 12,495, a gain of 142 over March.
  
Instagram: As of April 30, 2020, total Instagram Followers have increased to 142.
 
 
      ARISS Upcoming Events      

• May 15: Youth who have been part of the Airdrie Space Science Club in Airdrie, Alberta, Canada will speak with Chris Cassidy. The contact will be the new style Multipoint Telebridge via Amateur Radio with students at home.
  

• April 6: ARISS teacher Melissa Pore took part in virtual meetings with ScaN staff members and a number of education leaders on subjects such as radio telescopes, CubeSats and ARISS.  Also discussed were the development of lessons plans related to ARISS and amateur radio space communications.
  

 

• March 7: ARISS volunteer Will Marchant gave a presentation that included ARISS at the 2020 National Association of Rocketry’s annual conference (NARCON) held in Tucson, AZ.  He talked to an audience of 20 about ARISS and amateur radio in hobby rocketry.  A number of ARISS teachers have gotten students involved in hobby rockets that utilize ham radio for transmitting telemetry and Slow Scan TV color images.
  

• April 10: ARISS volunteer Melissa Pore KM4CZN continues to correspond with educators she met while hosting an exhibit table on behalf of ARISS at a February social networking event sponsored by the ISS National Lab Space Station Explorers at Space Center Houston.  The educators are interested in ARISS and most are in the US though a few are in other countries. They network via Facebook.
  

 

• April 13: A long article about ARISS was posted by ARRL (American Radio Relay League) on its web news page. The article, based on Frank Bauer’s post on ARISS’s web pages, described how ARISS is transforming activities to be done with infinite social distancing due to COVID-19 for students and education institutions.  ARRL ran the story also in its online weekly newsletter and on Twitter.  At last check, over 50 online radio news outlets around the US and the world had picked up the story.
  

 
         ARISS Upcoming Events     

• April 21:  The ARISS team will test a plan to transform ARISS contacts and how ARISS interacts with youth and education institutions through e-learning with every student and staff member in their own homes.
  

• April 7: ARISS teacher Joanne Michael and her students in Los Angeles, CA do balloon launches each year. After some discussions within ARISS on this idea, she challenged Ted Tagami of Magnitude.io (a Space Station Explorers program, like ARISS) in San Francisco to an intercontinental high altitude balloon race.  Each educator plans to launch from their locations a balloon that uses amateur radio/APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System) to downlink the balloon telemetry. Launches are set tentatively for June 1 at exactly the same minute; the winning balloon would be the first to reach the East Coast time zone. While still in the formative stage, the educators plan for students around the globe to be able to track and receive data such as location, height, temperature from each balloon in real time. The ARISS team plans to set up a website area to post interactive activities based on student age. Teachers and parents can excite at-home youth to track the states each balloon travels through and graph altitude vs temperature, etc.  To verify the capability, Joanne plans a balloon launch prior to June 1 so the ARISS team can perform an end-to-end test of the system. More news will follow.
  

• March-April: Pearl STEM Academy in Peoria, IL hosted a July 2018 ARISS contact. Students continue to be interested in space, even when home.  The academy’s ARISS volunteer posts Facebook items for students, including many NASA videos and stories. Recent posts were how to access NASA’s “Home for Students” activities and the Story Time From Space reading by Anne McClain of Ada Lace, Take Me to Your Leader.
  

• March-April: ARISS volunteer Brian Jackson teaches sixth grade in Alberta, Canada. His students had taken part in ISS National Lab Space Station Explorers’ Tomatosphere and a rainbow trout project prior to having to stay home.  He’s now e-teaching and students are receiving his weekly video of how the living things are doing.  In past years, Brian helped his students make ARISS contacts with Chris Hadfield and Robert Thirsk.
  

 
 
         ARISS Upcoming Events      

• April: The ARISS team continues to test and firm up a plan to transform ARISS contacts and how ARISS interacts with youth and education institutions. ARISS will provide distance learning with every student and staff member in their own homes (even quarantined).
  

• March 27: ARISS Italian team member Gianpietro Ferrario has been collaborating with the Deep Space Amateur Astronomers Group and the Planetarium of Lecco, in Lecco, Italy.  A YouTube virtual learning tour of the ISS was created and Gianpietro gave a talk that was livestreamed covering the functionality of ISS modules, service craft (i.e. the Soyuz and Dragon), and the ARISS radios. His talk expounded the aspects of ARISS operations and ARISS future planning for Gateway. Livestream stats showed 419 views and the chat room had comments from adults who were watching with their children. One teacher who does e-school helped 100 of her school’s students watch the program the next day.
  

• April 2: Frank Bauer and Rosalie White took part in a telecon with SCaN leaders to discuss possibly collaborating with NASA TV during the stay-home era.  ARISS readily agreed to the idea and quickly provided some pre-recorded programming about ARISS schools and the ARISS program.  SCaN will review the programming.  If it is suitable, SCaN will offer the options to NASA TV to consider broadcasting as at-home learning opportunities for teachers and parents to use with youth.

 

• April 2: The ARISS-US team continues to progress with plans to test and finalize the first of its several initiatives to transform how ARISS interacts with students and education institutions during the COVID era.  Per the mitigation ideal, ARISS team members will interact with infinite social distancing and engage virtually with each student and staff member in their own homes (even quarantined). More details will be shared soon.

 

• March 31: An ARISS radio contact planned for students of Amur State University in Blagoveshchensk, Russia was cancelled.
  

• April: The newest issue of the monthly journal, The Spectrum Monitor, contained a three-page article about STEM and STEAM by an ARISS enthusiast and supporter.  The writer pulled in a great deal of examples of hands-on student activities ARISS teachers have led, and he quoted Rosalie White on how teachers find sound ways to include the arts in their STEM projects.

 
          ARISS Upcoming Events      
          to be determined

• March 19:  The new ARISS radio system that was launched to the ISS in early March has now been moved out of the Dragon capsule by ISS crew members and is stowed on the Harmony module until ARISS receives one final approval.  The ARISS team is developing crew procedures for set-up and installation.
  

 

• March 25-27: ARISS contacts postponed this week because of host schools’ and education groups’ COVID closings are:  SPDW Voortrekker Movement Camp in Oranjeville, South Africa; Ramona Lutheran School in Ramona, CA and Amur State University in Blagoveshchensk, Russia.  The next school considering ARISS contact options is tentatively scheduled during the last of May, but is continuing to very closely monitor the area’s health situation.
  

 

• March 19: In a collaborative initiative between the ISS National Lab Space Station Explorers, Story Time From Space, and ARISS, the recent book Ada Lace, Take Me to Your Leader by Emily Calandrelli was read by Anne McClain for Story Time From Space. Anne read the book in three segments. The second segment features a tour of the ARISS radio station that includes details about ham radio and ARISS. At the end of the final segment, a video was included of Sunita Williams talking about the impact of ham radio on both the ISS astronauts and students taking part in ARISS activities. Many schools and media outlets—and even the USA’s First Lady—have recommended that parents have housebound youth listen to McClain read the book.  The Vermont Community Newspaper Group‘s (Burlington) reporter wrote in part, “A great way to get out of the house—way out of the house—without leaving home…. In this installment Ada is trying to fix a ham radio….  It’s a nice antidote to weighty issues, enjoying readings from weightlessness.”  A few posts recommending McClain’s YouTube thus far are: Los Angeles’s ABC TV7; Daily Times (Delaware County, PA); The Mercury (Berks County, PA); The Trentonian (NJ); The Barnstable Patriot (MA); the Orange School District and Hamilton School District (NJ); Palo Alto (CA) schools; and an education blog in Glasgow, Scotland.
  

• March 26: The online weekly news show, HamTalkLive!, featured an hour-long live interview of Frank Bauer talking about the new ARISS radios launched in early March to the ISS.  Several HamTalkLive! tweets were posted prior to the show to promote the ARISS interview and a number of listeners tweeted their questions for Frank to answer.

• March 20: Amateur Radio Newsline, another online weekly news program, presented a short piece about the new radio equipment sent to the ISS. This show highlighted the Kenwood transceiver and how it was set up by Kenwood engineers to improve the ARISS worldwide school and education group contacts, the ARISS Slow Scan Television sessions and APRS packet communications, and the tertiary backup communication system for the ISS. 

 

• March 20: An ARISS Italian team member and teacher, Micol Ivancic, gave a Skype talk with the theme being ham radio in space.  She presented a program covering the first days of ham radio communication in space by Owen Garriott to some future possibilities ARISS is considering for Lunar Gateway.  The Skype talk, sponsored by the Italian national ham radio society, was for hams and ham clubs and 47 viewers tied in.
  

• March 12: A 20-minute show about amateur radio was produced and run by the German broadcast radio station, WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk).  One fourth of the show, titled “Amateur Radio, More than a Hobby,” was devoted to ARISS.  A portion of one of Alex Gerst’s ARISS school contacts was included. The show is at:  https://www1.wdr.de/radio/wdr5/sendungen/neugier-genuegt/feature-amateurfunk-100.html

 
 
          ARISS Upcoming Events      

• TBD:  The ARISS team is studying options that ensure social distancing, with one part of the communications link—the one involving individual youth—being virtual.
  

o edit.