Today was an exciting day at school. We actually communicated with the International Space Station (ISS) as it flew over Michigan! A local Ham Radio operator put our school in some sort of a contest and we won! Actually, our school is a NASA Explorer School. This means that in 2004 we were chosen by NASA to be an Explorer School. We received a large grant from them to purchase equipment like weather monitoring and GPS equipment. Even though we're no longer receiving money from them, I'm wondering if our "status" got us an extra vote. Regardless, it was pretty cool.
A student from each classroom was picked to read a question to the astronauts aboard the space station. The tech people had all of our classrooms hooked up to receive a live feed from the room where they asked the questions. So we watched from our classroom as they made contact and then talked to the astronaut.
At first I was a little nervous, because the Ham Radio operator wasn't getting connected. He kept saying, "NA ISS, this is Tango 3 ..." and some other radio jargon I couldn't understand. He must have said it about 10 times before the astronaut called back. It was really exciting when he did! There was only time for about 3 questions to be answered before we lost contact again. It's not surprising - the ISS moves fast - it only took them 11 minutes to get from Alaska to Michigan!
It was a great experience for the student in our room who asked a question (he got a t-shirt too!) and also for the rest of the kids in the class. I mean, how often do you get to talk to a real live astronaut - who's talking back to you from space?!
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2 comments:
Wow, that's AWESOME! I bet all of your students want to be astronauts now.
That is really cool. What a fantastic memory for the class!
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