• 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.