ARISS School Contacts |
The space agencies have entrusted ARISS with the task to implement amateur radio contacts with schools for the astronauts on board the International Space Station. Candidate schools shall prepare a space oriented educative project and submit an Application to the ARISS school selection committee. This international committee meets every month per teleconference. Selected schools are put on waiting list. The Application form can be downloaded from this webpage. The list of pending applications for the European region is also available on this webpage. The waiting time is between 1 and 2 years. Every week the ARISS Operations Committee meets per teleconference to identify the best opportunities for the next schools on the list. Several parameters are to be taken into account: number of contacts authorized by the agencies, geographical location of the schools, orbital movement of the ISS, possible time segments on board as well as for the schools. The scheduling process takes about two months. A volunteering ARISS "mentor" helps the school and the volunteering ground station operators to prepare the contact. Important aspects of this preparation are detailed in the "Step by Step Guide" available on this webpage. When a direct ARISS School Contact is scheduled in the European region we circulate an announcement to the subscribers of the ARISS-Europe News Bulletin. Interested parties are invited to listen to the astronaut answering the questions prepared by the students. Radioamateurs can easily receive the radio signal transmitted from the ISS when it is in line of sight of their station. When a direct ARISS School Contact cannot be done, the option is to do a "telebridge". In that case, the radio contact is done by one of the dedicated ARISS ground stations located in USA, Europe, Hawaii, Australia and South Africa and the up- and downlink audio is relayed to the school, courtesy of Verizon Conferencing Inc. the world telephone company. Telebridge contacts are mostly relayed worldwide by Echolink and IRLP. Reports of ARISS School Contacts are available on the ARISS-Europe News Bulletins archive page. Some recordings and pictures can also be downloaded. The complete process for a successful ARISS School Contact is explained in the ARISS Application Form Instructions (see sidebar).
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