• 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.