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 Previous: The K7VVV Solar Update |  Next: Contesting Among the Lions (and Watch out for those Electric Eggs!) |
NEWINGTON, CT, Dec 8, 2000--Students at the Luther Burbank School in Burbank, Illinois, will get a chance to speak with the crew of Space Station Alpha later this month. Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) spokesman Will Marchant, KC6ROL, says the contact will take place on Monday, December 18 starting at around 2202 UTC. If that doesn't work, they'll try again Tuesday, December 19 starting at around 2100 UTC. The contact is expected to last about 10 minutes.
"The ISS downlink is on the 145.80 MHz 'public' frequency," Marchant said. Efforts are under way to set up a Web cast of the occasion. SAREX veteran and professional engineer Charlie Sufana, AJ9N, will be in charge of the Amateur Radio setup at the school. He's planning to run anywhere from 75 W to 140 W into a 20-element antenna. Sufana says he plans to start setting up the gear this weekend.
The Luther Burbank School in Burbank, Illinois. [Burbank School Photo] |
The Burbank School is located on the southwest side of Chicago and has a population of 700 pupils in kindergarten through eighth grade. The school first applied for a SAREX QSO in January 1996, and its application has been the one waiting the longest in the files. Another 18 schools are under consideration for ARISS school contacts.
Burbank teacher Rita Wright says word of the impending ARISS contact has generated a flurry of educational activities at the school. "Since being notified of our ISS contact, our teachers and students have been very busy with space, space station, and space exploration topics and activities," said Wright, who's the eighth-grade science and math teacher. "Our school is vibrating with excitement and activity."
For starters, the entire school population participated in an art contest to create a Burbank School/ISS "mission patch." Auditions for a team of 12 students and two backups to actually speak to the ISS crew members resulted in a group from a cross-section of classes.
Youngsters throughout the school also suggested a wide variety of questions to put to the Expedition 1 crew. "If you walked into our school today and wandered down the halls, you would be surprised at the variety of topics, activities, and displays of work all centered around the ISS mission," Wright said.
The activities have been at all grade levels, and even the youngest pupils are involved. "Our first graders have been creating space people and space capsules," she said. "They even have Winnie the Pooh in a space suit!"
Wright said the chatter coming from classrooms focuses on space, shuttles, space stations, and the latest information about the ISS.
Wright says youngsters in the middle grades have been busy imagining that they are crew members aboard the space station. "They tracked the ISS on the Web and plotted on a map where the space station was every 45 minutes," she said. "They wrote time lines comparing our school day to the ISS."
The junior high students searched the Web for information on Space Station Alpha and created a ten-slide presentation that will be shown on the day of the ARISS contact. Other junior high classes worked on creating a NASA time line, she said. Mathematics classes calculated the distance between the ISS and Burbank, Illinois, over a period of several days "so students understood the idea that it was moving constantly," Wright said.
Some "future engineers" at the school designed and built the space station of the year 2030. "They not only built the model, they also wrote a paper describing how and where it will be built," Wright said. Other students developed a plan to solve an environmental problem using space station technology.
Everyone in the Burbank School community is looking forward to their big day. "We here at Burbank School are ready," Wright declared.
News media also have been alerted and reporters, cameras, and microphones are expected to be at the school on the day of the contact. A telephone link is planned between the school and MSNBC.
More information about requesting dedicated contacts is available on the ARISS web pages.
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