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 Previous: Contesting Among the Lions (and Watch out for those Electric Eggs!) |  Next: Noted Amateur Radio Author Joe Carr, K4IPV, SK |
Youngsters at the Luther Burbank School in Burbank, Illinois, held a competition to pick the best patch for the event. This is the one they picked. [Burbank School Photo] |
NEWINGTON, CT, Dec 11, 2000--Tuesday, December 19, will be a banner day at Luther Burbank Elementary School in Burbank, Illinois. The Amateur Radio on the International Space Station--or ARISS--program has announced today that a dozen youngsters at the Burbank School will be the first to get a chance to talk to the ISS Expedition 1 crew via Amateur Radio. The approximately 10-minute pass will start next Tuesday at around 2100 UTC--3 PM Central Time.
George Masek, KB9UNA (left, in orange hat), John Gianotti, W9WY (center) and Charlie Sufana, AJ9N (right) check the balance of the backup antenna at Burbank School. |
Getting the schedule pinned down was not easy. "With multiple spacewalks, and lots of repairs on the ISS, the schedulers and crews have been extremely busy," said ARISS spokesperson Will Marchant, KC6ROL. ARISS had announced two possible dates late last week. Now that the space shuttle is back on Earth, NASA was able to turn its attention to working out a schedule for the contact.
SAREX/ARISS veteran mentor Charlie Sufana, AJ9N, who's in charge of setting up the Amateur Radio station at the Chicago-area school, said he, several other amateurs, a few parents and the school's principal installed two antennas on the school's roof over the weekend. "I am having a short practice with the kids Monday night," Sufana said.
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AJ9N and W9WY and an unidentified parent helper do field repair soldering on the backup antenna rotor control cable. | The ARISS primary antenna, waiting for a contact. |
The ISS downlink will be on 145.80 MHz. Marchant says efforts are under way to set up a Web cast of the occasion.
The Burbank School is located on the southwest side of Chicago and has a population of 700 pupils in kindergarten through eighth grade. Another 18 schools are under consideration for ARISS school contacts.
Burbank teacher Rita Wright says she and her colleagues have been incorporating ISS and space-related themes into the curriculum and have developed a Burbank School/ISS "mission patch."
The first ARISS school contact is expected to attract the attention of Chicago-area news media. A telephone link is planned between the school and MSNBC.
More information about requesting dedicated contacts is available on the ARISS web pages.
| Previous: Contesting Among the Lions (and Watch out for those Electric Eggs!) | Next: Noted Amateur Radio Author Joe Carr, K4IPV, SK |
