ARISS School Contacts |
The space agencies entrust ARISS with the task of implementing amateur radio contacts for schools, allowing students to put questions to astronauts on board the International Space Station and receive their answer direct from space. Candidate schools shall prepare a space oriented educative project and submit an Application to the ARISS School Selection Committee. Selected schools are put on a waiting list. There are waiting lists in each of the ARISS Regions: USA, Canada, Europe (extended to Africa and the Middle East), Russia, Far East and Australia. 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. Crews on the International Space Station stay on board for six months. For each of these "Expeditions", the ARISS Operations Committee upgrades schools from the regional waiting lists to the "To Do" list. Several parameters are to be taken into account, such as the number of contacts authorized by the agencies, the presence onboard of licensed astronauts, the chronology of submitted Applications. ARISS Operations Committee members meet weekly per teleconference. For each school on the "To Do" list a volunteering Mentor is nominated. The Mentor takes up the responsibility to prepare the school and the local radio amateurs for the upcoming radio contact. Important aspects of this preparation are detailed in the "ARISS School Contacts procedure" available on this webpage. When an 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 set up a "telebridge". In that case, the radio contact is performed by one of the dedicated ARISS ground stations, located in the USA, Europe, Hawaii, Australia and Argentina. The up- and downlink audio is relayed between the school and the ground station per phoneline. The audio of telebridge contacts is mostly distributed real time by Echolink and IRLP. Reports of ARISS School Contacts are available on the ARISS-Europe Archive page. Some recordings and pictures are attached to the archived ARISS-Europe News Bulletins and can be downloaded. The complete process for a successful ARISS School Contact is explained in the ARISS School Contacts procedure (see sidebar). IMPORTANT REMARK : Please read carefully the documents available in the left column. Technical requirements for the setting up of a radio station (direct contact) are given in item 4bis), which is a Zoho page. To edit this Zoho page, click button in upper right corner. There are three Zoho sheets included for checking your setup.
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