Students at three schools participated in a bit of ham radio history Friday, September 22, when they spoke with the International Space Station’s first female civilian space visitor and two astronauts.
The Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) program sponsored the separate, direct VHF contacts with US civilian space traveler Anousheh Ansari, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Thomas Reiter, DF4TR, and US astronaut Jeff Williams, KD5TVQ. Ansari told students gathered at George Washington University, her alma mater, that everything looks “so beautiful” from the ISS.
“It’s great up here,” Ansari told the students, “The weightlessness feels fantastic. It’s like floating like a feather.”
Youngsters from Washington, DC-area elementary and middle and high schools joined GWU students in interviewing Ansari, who spoke via NA1SS with Williams as the control operator. Ansari, who returned to Earth September 28 with Williams and ISS Expedition 13 Commander Pavel Vinogradov, RV3BS, said she misses her family on Earth, but “otherwise, I think I’m just going to stay up here,” she quipped.
Goddard Amateur Radio Club (GARC) members set up and operated the necessary station equipment for the contact between NA1SS and GWU Earth station KE4GDU.
In addition to the GWU event, Ansari, using the Russian RS0ISS call sign, made random Amateur Radio contacts during her ISS stay with a number of hams around the world. At one point she was seeking stations in her native Iran.
Space Adventures Ltd arranged with the Russian Space Agency for Ansari to join the Expedition 14 team of Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria, KE5GTK, and cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, RZ3FT, on the Soyuz “taxi flight” to the ISS last week.
Earlier on that same orbit, during a contact arranged by the ESA in cooperation with ARISS, Reiter chatted via HB4FR with students at the Gymnase Intercantonal de la Broye, in Payerne, Switzerland, using the German DP0ISS call sign. The contact was conducted in English.
Reiter answered eight questions from the 15 to 17 year olds – 22 in all – as 50 onlookers gathered around the radio and another 350 witnessed the contact via an Amateur TV link. The contact attracted media coverage from several TV outlets and newspapers.
The school set up for the contact in the museum Clin d’Ailes at the Payerne Swiss Air Force Base, the home of HB4FR. First to greet Thomas on the air was his friend and Museum Foundation President Claude Nicollier, HB9CN, the first Swiss astronaut. The event was part of “Swiss Space Days” activities organized by the Swiss Astronautics Association.
During the five-minute radio contact, eight students got to ask questions. Responding to one of them, Reiter said the ISS crew has been trying to spot the Great Wall of China from space but has not been successful. He said he’d make another attempt and see if he could get a photo. Reiter this week officially became part of the ISS Expedition 14 crew.
On the following ISS orbit, Williams answered questions put to him by students at Crete-Monee Middle School in Crete, Illinois. The contact was Williams’s 15th and final school QSO of his ISS duty tour before he headed home September 28. Williams told the youngsters that while he was looking forward to returning to Earth and reuniting with his family, his time in space has been both exhilarating and very rewarding “for all the obvious reasons.”
As Williams put it: “Getting here is very exciting, being here is very exciting with all the unique things you can do in weightlessness and the unique things you can see from here, and, of course, going home’s going to be pretty exciting too.”
Williams said eating in space can be difficult “if you don’t manage your food” in the microgravity environment where meals won’t simply sit on a plate. “It’s a lot of fun to play with your food,” he added.
As the approximately nine-minute contact between NA1SS and AJ9N drew to a close, Williams urged the students to set their goals high and “go for them!” An audience of 800 – mostly other students – was on hand, and representatives from two TV stations and a local newspaper showed up to report the event. Members of the Lake County Amateur Radio Club (LARC) and the Kankakee Amateur Radio Society (KARS) set up the station at the school for the ARISS contact, and audio was streamed onto the KARS W9AZ repeater.
The Expedition 13 of Vinogradov and Williams returned to Earth September 29 (UTC) in the steppes of Kazakhstan. The Soyuz TMA-8 spacecraft landed some 50 miles northeast of Arkalyk, and Russian recovery forces and NASA officials arrived at the site shortly after touchdown.
ARISS http://www.rac.ca/ariss is an international educational outreach with US participation by ARRL, AMSAT and NASA.