On Monday, May 5, NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Takuya Onishi aboard the International Space Station (ISS) will answer prerecorded questions from elementary and middle school students, plus those attending STEM academies, in Mansfield, Texas. The questions will be focused on the areas of science and technology, and the 20-minute space-to-Earth discussion will take place at 10:40 a.m. EDT, and can be watched on the NASA STEM YouTube Channel.
“For more than 24 years, astronauts have continuously lived and worked aboard the space station, testing technologies, performing science, and developing skills needed to explore farther from Earth. Astronauts aboard the orbiting laboratory communicate with NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston 24 hours a day through SCaN’s (Space Communications and Navigation) Near Space Network,” notes the NASA press release.
Astronauts on the ISS have had over 1,000 educational contacts with students on Earth. The program, known as ISS Ham Radio or Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS), has continuously operated since 2000, connecting over 100 crew members with more than 1 million students. Each year, the program hosts about a hundred contacts.
“In May 2018, a student at Mill Springs Academy in Alpharetta, Georgia, Andrew Maichle, talked to NASA astronaut Scott Tingle on the International Space Station via amateur or ham radio. The experience profoundly affected Maichle, who went on to study electrical engineering at Clemson University in South Carolina,” reported a NASA article in November 2023.
“It was so cool to see in real time the utmost levels of what people in science are able to accomplish, and to talk to and interact with someone at that level,” Maichle said. “The space station is an incredible work of engineering and to interact with someone in space was just mind-boggling. I was extraordinarily honored and very lucky to have had the opportunity.”
