• Feb 13-14: Three ARISS-US Education Committee members gave presentations at the online 2021 Orlando HamCation. 
  1. Melissa Pore and two of her high school students presented to 110 Zoom viewers on using ARISS and amateur radio in space to enhance school science and engineering classes.  Another 103 people viewed the recording.
  2. Alan Johnston’s presentation included two of Pore’s students and how they and she engaged with the AMSAT CubeSat simulator in class, and how other educators can. This device lets students experiment with operations and features of a typical ham radio CubeSat. Live views totaled 212. Another 211 people viewed the recording.
  3. Neil Rapp, who won the convention’s 2021 educator award, was vetted for his STEM education efforts and he spoke about Young Operators on The Air (YOTA) and its tie to ARISS. YOTA is a nationwide group of young hams and has been selected for an ARISS contact in 2021. Rapp reported 67 live views and 10 watching the recording afterwards.

• February 13: ARISS volunteer Melissa Pore teaches engineering at Bishop O’Connell High School in Arlington, VA and she and her students took part in a Zoom meeting hosted by the University of Southern Maine (USM). The event kicked off the formal opening of the USM CubeSat Design Competition and Pore’s students want to compete. Meeting attendees included 10 high school teachers, 10 professors, and 10 industry professionals.  Students viewed the recorded session.

• February 12: ARISS recently opened a window to accept ARISS Education Proposals from education institutions interested in hosting ARISS contacts. In addition to the ARISS team distributing a news release to many media outlets about the window opening, the NASA EXPRESS newsletter received a blurb from ARISS. The blurb was accepted. NASA EXPRESS went to 50,918 subscribers and was shared through the Office of STEM Engagement’s social media tools with 299,777 @NASASTEM Twitter followers, 90,413 NASA STEM Engagement Facebook followers, and 372,820 NASA STEM Pinterest followers. This means NASA EXPRESS content will be viewed by 813,928 followers.

 

• February 15: Rosalie White gave a talk on “The ARISS Mission” to 14 amateur radio clubs associated with Boeing companies around the US.  Boeing sponsors two main types of clubs; they are called Boeing Employees Amateur Radio Society, a general-interest ham club and Boeing Auxiliary Communications Services, focused on ham radio emergency communications. Tying in were 29 members and 3 guests who were educators.  

 

• February 19: Students at home from Bishop Guertin High School in Nashua, NH, had an ARISS radio contact with Shannon Walker. Details will be available for next week’s report.

 

• February 24-26: Two ARISS schools in Colorado received tentative schedules (due to the NG-15 launch) for an ARISS contact—Estes Park Elementary School and JFK High School.

         Upcoming Events

• Feb19   Bishop Guertin High School, Nashua NH, ARISS contact
  
• Feb 24  JFK High School, Denver CO, ARISS contact                                   
  
• Feb 26  Estes Park Elementary School, Estes Park CO, ARISS contact                         
  

• February 9: Students at Sterling Middle School in Ashburn, VA had a successful ARISS radio contact with Shannon Walker; students were tied in from home through the ARISS ground station in Belgium. Walker answered 20 student questions as 350 viewers watched a YouTube livestream connection; it is at: https://youtu.be/qVhBweqjCo4.  Within two days, another 1,723 people had viewed the video. A recording was posted at the school district web site along with the NASA infographic about ARISS, details on students participating in a balloon launch and tracking its ham radio payload, and STEM activities that Sterling Park Amateur Radio Club members had mentored. Youth had learned coding, robotics, radio waves and communications, astronomy, STEM in 30 lessons, and were especially interested in the Artemis Mission. The school had involved students from two other area schools: Sterling Elementary School and Guilford Elementary School.
  

• February 10: Red Hill Lutheran School in Tustin, CA sponsored an ARISS radio contact with Mike Hopkins who answered 21 questions. The school’s audience of 300 followed CDC Covid guidelines while other students were home asking questions relayed by an ARISS ground station in Oregon. The contact, livestreamed for the public, garnered 382 views and three days later, another 1,301 views. The URL is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhfWvzOtnQM. Minutes before the contact, a video featured students highlighting their STEAM projects done as prep for their ARISS contact—the school uses California Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards and electives are robotics, computer programming, and 3-D printing. Prior to Covid, ARISS volunteers had helped 210 students and their teachers to do ham radio contacts and experiment with Raspberry Pi.  Media hits included a story aired by Los Angeles KABC-TV and also posted on its web site, and an Orange County Register newspaper article, which is at:  https://www.ocregister.com/location/california/orange-county/tustin/    
  

• February 5: The Ottawa Carleton Virtual Online School, one of the Ottawa Carleton District schools in Ontario, Canada hosted an ARISS radio contact with Mike Hopkins. Students at 17 district schools had been involved and one student from each school asked a question. They were conferenced in from home via a Zoom session tied to an ARISS ground station relaying their communication to the ISS. An audience of 893 viewed the contact live via a YouTube stream, and 24 hours later, another 3,565 watched. The URL is: https://youtu.be/Ery1JYmk72o. Media included pre- and post-contact stories by the Ottawa Citizen newspaper and CTV TV’s posted story and TV clip, which was carried across Canada—even in Edmonton, AB; the URL is: https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=2134102&binId=1.1487308&playlistPageNum=1 A school board member wrote: “The students were entranced this morning and one of our teachers has reported that many have asked a lot of great questions about it this afternoon.” 
  

• February 3: The Bishop Guertin High School has an upcoming ARISS contact and students had generated so many good questions that not all could possibly be answered by the astronaut. Students in the STEM Club decided to help solve that problem by preparing a video to use as part of the programming on the day of the ARISS contact. In the video, they provide answers to nine questions that there would be no time to answer. Three students in the video have earned their ham radio license.  The URL is: https://vimeo.com/508990133/9f8ea41659
  

• January 29: The Savannah River Academy in Grovetown, GA has an upcoming ARISS radio contact. The school’s Facebook page announced the contact by posting an eye-catching graphic. ARISS-US Education Committee member Martha Muir shared this quote from the school’s lead ARISS educator: “They are all very excited about their upcoming ARISS contact.”

 

• February 9: ARISS-US leader John Kludt gave a presentation on ARISS to members of the Gwinnett Amateur Radio Society, a club in metro Atlanta, GA.  He spoke on what it took to design, develop, and build the ARISS radio station that was first operational on the ISS in September 2020 and a little about the current ISS crew operating the radio system.
  

 

• February 13-14: The popular annual convention, Florida Hamcation had three speakers who are members of the ARISS-US Education Committee.  More details will be available for next week’s report.
  

 

• January 21:  ARISS leaders Kathy Lamont and John Kludt led an ARISS Orientation Webinar for 31 educators and a number of ARISS educators and volunteers from around the US.  This session was for educators whose schools were selected for an ARISS contact because their ARISS Education Proposals were so excellent.  The ARISS contacts will be held between July and December 2021.
  

         Upcoming Events 
 

• February 15: Bishop DJ O’Connell High School students of ARISS educator Melissa Pore will participate in a Zoom session hosted by the University of Southern Maine as its formal kick-off to its CubeSat Design Competition.
  

 

• February 15: Rosalie White will present a Zoom talk on the ARISS mission to 14 amateur radio clubs associated with Boeing companies around the US.

 

• February 19: Students at Bishop Guertin High School in Nashua, NH will hold an ARISS contact with Shannon Walker.

• January 28: An ARISS radio contact for students at Amur State University in Blagoveshchensk, Russia was successful. Cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov supported the contact and first year students of the university’s space training classes asked him questions. Students’ recent activities had included downloading SSTV images downlinked by cosmonauts on the ISS in December. The ARISS contact and the downloading of SSTV images were part of the "About Gagarin from Space" program.
  

• January 28: An ARISS student was featured in the ISS National Lab (INL) Science in Space Today, an e-newsletter going to thousands. The ARISS item was one of seven in the newsletter and highlighted a blog contributed by an ARISS student to INL’s ISS 360.  INL had asked the young lady to pen the blog on how the ARISS contact she took part in had affected her current and future STEM studies.
  

• January 28-29: Radio enthusiasts around the world engaged in a Slow Scan TV (SSTV) event made possible by the Moscow Aviation Institute SSTV Experiment onboard the ISS. During this event, ham radio operators and space fans downloaded historical images of spacecraft and cosmonauts from the Russian space program. Throughout the event, 645 different individuals posted 1,887 images at the ARISS SSTV Gallery website for public viewing:  https://www.spaceflightsoftware.com/ARISS_SSTV/.
  

• February 5: A group of students at the Dal'nevostochnyy Federal'nyy Universitet (Far Eastern Federal University) in Vladivostok, Russia took part in an ARISS school contact. The university sponsors a number of space projects and this radio event was in conjunction with the “About Gagarin from Space” program. Sergey Ryzhikov supported the radio contact.  
  

 

• February 4-6: Three ARISS-US Education Committee members presented at two different sessions of the Space Exploration Educators Conference (SEEC) at Space Center Houston; the conference drew over 900 attendees. Gina Kwid and Beth Bivens, educators at Galileo STEM Academy in Eagle, ID co-led a presentation on their students’ STEM activities over many months following their 2019 ARISS contact, plus information on the ARISS proposal process. The 2018 SEEC ARISS exhibit is how the two educators had learned about ARISS and one of them proclaimed that their ARISS contact was “the best, or one of the two best things” she has ever done in her teaching career. The second ARISS-related SEEC session was co-led by Melissa Pore and a Space Center Houston Scientist in Residence. They demonstrated how to build a miniature neutral buoyancy lab for a classroom, offered hands-on lessons on science and engineering concepts that relate to space and under water, how Pore got involved due to her ARISS school contact, plus how teachers can get involved in ARISS. She made guest appearances at three other SEEC sessions to talk about teacher engagement in ARISS and its 20 years in space. All SEEC video presentations will be viewable to attendees for a year.
  

 

• February 2: ARISS volunteer Gordon West gave a presentation on ARISS to the student amateur radio teams and their sponsor at Sato Academy of Math & Science and McBride High School, both in Long Beach, CA. Their sponsor brings radio activities to the students who are interested in careers in medicine and engineering. West has worked with the students previously, and this time, showed them the types of STEM opportunities ARISS can provide.

 

• February 5: An ARISS contact with Mike Hopkins took place for students from 17 Ottawa Carleton District schools in Ontario, Canada, with the Ottawa Carleton Virtual Online School as lead school. More details will be available next week.

          Social Media
          Facebook - January 2021

 *January’s Biggest Reach--a post about an upcoming SSTV session on crews and spacecraft--garnering a whopping 15,457 Reaches and 1,293 Engagements.

Twitter: As of January 31, 2021, ARISS Twitter followers totaled 14,207, a slight gain over December.
 
Instagram: As of January 31, 2021, Instagram followers increased to 267, somewhat larger than December.
 
YouTube Members: As of January 31, 2020, there are 820 YouTube members.
 
ARISS Web Unique Pageviews:  For January 1 – 31, the total of Unique Pageviews was 47,055.
 ******
 
        Upcoming Events 

• February 9: Sterling Middle School in Ashburn, VA will host an ARISS radio contact with Shannon Walker.

 

• February 10: Students at Red Hill Lutheran in Tustin, CA are looking forward to their ARISS contact with Mike Hopkins, and will be in school following Covid guidelines. 

 

• January 21: The Sea Road School in Kennebunk, part of Maine Regional School Unit 21, hosted a successful ARISS contact. Students from six Kennebunk area schools were at home connected online through an ARISS ham relay ground station in Italy. They enjoyed a conversation with Mike Hopkins who answered 20 questions. The schools besides Sea Road School whose students took part in the contact and space and radio activities were Kennebunk Elementary School, Kennebunkport Consolidated School, Middle School of Kennebunk, Mildred L. Day School, and Kennebunk High School. A girl declared: “I almost fainted when I heard him answer my question.” A boy said, “I was sweating a lot!” Schools highlighted space and STEM in cross-curriculum courses. Sea Road School’s STEM team collaborated with several area amateur radio clubs, one of which offered a free course in electronics and radio fundamentals, radio demos, and electronics project-building. The day’s events were streamed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN70OpJFMgs with 400 live views, and a week later, 1,163 additional viewers. Media included TV stations WMTW and WABI and three online news services, with one of the latter posting a story from a writer who was realizing, while watching the ARISS contact, the effect Christa McAuliffe had on his life: https://www.seacoastonline.com/story/opinion/2021/01/28/opinion-looking-life-mcauliffes-legacy-alive-well-rsu-21/6699452002/
  

• January 21: ARISS YouTube channel subscribers topped 1,000!  The channel was set up only eight months ago.
  

• January 28: An ARISS contact was scheduled with Amur State University students in Blagoveshchensk. Cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov supported the contact and more details will be available soon.
  

 

• January 22: Students in Prince William County, VA were featured in the ISS National Lab blog, ISS360.  After their pre-Covid ARISS school contact, the K-5 Gifted Education Resource teacher (and ARISS-US Education Committee lead) Kathy Lamont led them in DreamUp’s Germs in Space activities. Students became scientists, swabbing surfaces for microbes and discovering that the Petri dish with a swab of library books was the most active!
  

• January 21: Perception Pictures released a six-minute sci-fi horror film titled Decommissioned that features SuitSat, a satellite the ARISS team designed in 2006. The film depicts SuitSat as a menacing force terrorizing an ISS crew member, played by Joey Vieira. The ARISS team had developed and built an antenna and radio gear to fit in a decommissioned Orlan spacesuit that was deployed from the ISS as a free-floating satellite. For two weeks, SuitSat transmitted friendly ham radio messages pre-recorded by ARISS in several languages from students around the globe, plus telemetry and slow-scan TV images as it circled Earth. The link to the film clip is:

https://vimeo.com/502018179?ref=fb-share&fbclid=IwAR30zx8S6hrcF41aSQSFMpoqTh-ASjAxRxpVPlRj4IZocZJBd9HMX4HiqCs. 

• ARRL, an ARISS sponsor, invited a popular YouTube channel host to interview Frank Bauer and the director of the sci-fi film in early February. Bauer will cover the development and implementation of the real SuitSat 1 and 2 and the rewarding story of ARISS that continues today.
  

• January 28: The Newcastle (WY) High School ARISS contact was unsuccessful; troubleshooting began immediately, with the focus being on the antenna path (which was changed during the preceding Bartolomeo EVA), since the radio appears functional. The school contact will be re-scheduled.
  

 

• January 28-29: An SSTV session was sponsored by Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI-75) with images downlinked from the ISS Service Module radio. Full details will be in next week’s report.
  

         
Upcoming Events 
 

• February 4-6: Three ARISS-US Education Committee members will give two different presentations related to ARISS at sessions during the 2021 Space Exploration Educators Conference.
  

 

• February 5: An ARISS school contact is scheduled for students in Vladivostok, Russia. Sergey Ryzhikov will support this.

 

• February 5: Students at the Ottawa Carleton District School are tentatively scheduled for an ARISS contact with Mike Hopkins.  

• January 13: The Shigagakuen Junior & Senior High School in Higashioumi, Japan hosted an ARISS contact for students to take part in a Q&A session with Shannon Walker. On site were 60 people social distancing and the school livestreamed the action for more students to participant. The online audience totaled 355. The event began with a 30-minute video on school activities. That was followed by several speakers and an introduction of students chosen to ask the questions. Walker answered 16 questions. Reporters from a TV station and three newspapers prepared media pieces. The video recording was edited down and within seven days had 1,889 views; the URL is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g01fRpf5B8c.
  

• January 20: A successful ARISS school contact took place for students at the Hisagi Junior High School in Zushi, Japan with Shannon Walker. During the contact, she answered questions from 12 girls and boys. The school livestreamed the event reaching an audience of 539 and 5 days later, another 1,956. Reporters from six newspapers and one cable TV station covered the story. Soichi Noguchi surprised everyone by floating to the ARISS ham station to take a selfie with Shannon as she was finishing with the school. He Tweeted about the ARISS contact, generating a lot of attention—within 2 days, 5.5K Likes and 436 Retweets.
  

•  January 19: ARISS volunteer and teacher Micol Ivancic in Milan, Italy engaged her students in an Italian Space Agency (ASI) project that asked people to do creative writing or drawings, build models, and so on—all tied to the Artemis Lunar Gateway program. Each item was submitted as a proposal to ASI; the agency set up informatics support and stated that the items will be on the initial Lunar Gateway flight to orbit the Moon. Ivancic told her 11- and 12-year-old students, “We're locked down, but we go to the Moon!” Her students decided how Ivancic should build a spacesuit and instructed her in the process. Students ensured that the spacesuit’s accessories included a hand-held amateur radio (see green radio in upper pocket).
  

• January 21: Students from five schools in the Kennebunk, ME, area took part in an ARISS contact with Mike Hopkins, hosted by Maine Regional School.  More details will be available next week.
  

 
         Upcoming Events 
 

• January 28: Students at Newcastle High School in Newcastle, WY, will speak with Victor Glover during an ARISS school contact.
  

 

• January 28-29: An SSTV session is tentatively planned by Moscow Aviation Institute (MAI-75) with images downlinked from the ISS Service Module radio.

• January 11: ARISS-US Education Committee member Neil Rapp won the national 2021 Carole Perry Educator of the Year Award. For 19 years, he has sponsored the Bloomington High School South Ham Radio Club while teaching science at this school in Bloomington, IN. In past years, he garnered the ARRL Professional Educator of the Year Award and Indiana Amateur of the Year Award and sponsored a Shuttle Amateur Radio EXperiment contact for his students.

• January 5: Students at Sterling Middle School in Ashburn, VA are ready for their ARISS contact in February. They enjoyed tracking a virtual mid-altitude balloon launch and teachers plan to tie this to lessons on air pressure. Students designed an ARISS mission patch and participated in a space colony challenge, planning its mission and a colony motto. They engaged in Udar Hazy STEM in 30 lessons. Each youth had submitted a question they would want to ask an astronaut; students voted on the best two questions from each grade level. They studied ham radio communications and how this will work for their ARISS contact.

• January 6: Lydia Bennett took part in an ARISS contact while in middle school and is now a high school junior. During the years In between, she earned her ham license and kept in touch with her middle school teacher Martha Muir who is on the ARISS-US Education Committee. This summer Lydia gave a virtual AIAA district conference poster talk on her ARISS experience. The ISS National Lab (INL) took note of her poster talk and asked her to write a blog for their online site ISS360. She did so and the blog is now live at: https://www.issnationallab.org/blog/ariss-lydia-bennett-saint-francis-high-school/  She plans to take an engineering class her senior year.
  

• January 11: The ARISS Award Committee distributed 4,675 certificates to ham operators and the general public who posted images they downloaded during the December 2020 ARISS SSTV session. Once people post an image to the ARISS SSTV Gallery, they can request a certificate. The event commemorated 20 years of ARISS success. 
  

• January 1: Catherine Deskur took part in an ARISS contact at the Kopernik Observatory and Science Center in Vestal, NY in 2015 and a few months beforehand, had earned her ham radio license.  She said her most memorable ham radio contact was when acting as control operator for the ARISS contact. Now she attends Harvard University and The New England Conservatory seeking degrees in computer science and double bass performance. She earned the Girl Scouts Gold Award for her project to inspire girls to follow STEM careers. Because of her continuing interest in STEM, she recently garnered a scholarship from a ham radio organization.  

•  January 13: The Oswaldo Guayasamín School of Basic Education in the Galapagos--Santa Cruz Island, Ecuador hosted an ARISS contact, described in last week’s report. School leaders wrote that the video posted on the school Facebook page about the ARISS contact got 10,860 Likes, 3,962 Loves, 166 Cares, 247 Comments, and 3,200 Shares. This was thousands of times higher than for anything posted in the past.

• January 13: Students at Shigagakuen Junior & Senior High School in Higashioumi, Japan experienced a successful ARISS school contact with Shannon Walker. Details about the day’s events will be available soon. 

 
          Upcoming Events 
 

• January 20: Students at Hisagi Junior High School in Zushi, Japan will have an ARISS radio contact with Shannon Walker supporting.

 

• January 21: Maine Regional School in Kennebunk, Maine is hosting an ARISS contact for students. Mike Hopkins will support this radio contact.

• December 26: A professor who also manages the amateur radio station at the University of Arizona (U of A) had told students about the December ARISS SSTV downlinks. One student built a radio system so he could receive high quality images, but had a day of system failures. The next morning at 3 AM, the student and professor went to the U of A observatory roof to try the system. The student’s downloads were no better. He went home and developed a receiver chain; it included amplifiers and filters. His determination paid off; he began receiving great images that celebrated ARISS’s 20 years of success. 

  

• December 2020: An ARISS follower and ham radio operator enjoyed engaging students from the Kamehameha High School Science Club in Maui, Hawaii in space communications.  The high school students tracked satellites and were interested in ARISS activities.

         Upcoming Events  

• January 13: Shigagakuen Junior & Senior High School in Higashioumi, Japan is scheduled for an ARISS school contact. Shannon Walker will support the radio contact.

 

• January 20: Students at Hisagi Junior High School inZushi, Japan will have an ARISS radio contact with Shannon Walker supporting.

 

• January 21: Maine Regional School in Kennebunk, Maine is hosting an ARISS contact. Mike Hopkins will support this radio contact

• 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.