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Danbury students talk with astronaut on International Space Station

Some Danbury students had an out of this world experience Thursday.  20 students from two schools talked live with Astronaut Shane Kimbrough, a West Point graduate who served in Iraq before becoming a scientists, who is orbiting the earth on board the International Space Station. 

 

50 organizations around the world, including professionals, are selected each year to participate in this opportunity. Westside Middle School Academy was 1 of the 10 groups from the United States to be selected for this round of contact with the International Space Station. Some of the students will now go on to get their HAM radio licenses.

 

 

NASA and the Amateur Radio on the ISS coordinated this rare opportunity for Westside Middle School Academy and South Street Primary School.  The students wrote their own questions about experiments done in space, personal needs, mental health issues and what happens if there's an emergency. NASA had to vet the questions three weeks in advance of Thursday's event.  The ISS was traveling more than 17,000 miles per hour, and connected through an amateur radio ground station in Belgium. 

 

Students in the rest of the school listened in from their classrooms.

 

Danbury parent, Gary Dahlstrom, made the proposal to NASA and worked with Westside teacher Jon Neuhausel to coordinate the event.  Neuhausel is the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Theme Coach.  Neuhausel says the students studied robotics, the future of space exploration and the uses for HAM radio in every day life to prepare for the talk with Kimbrough.

 

ARISS is an arm of the Amateur Radio Relay League, which is the governing body of ham radio operators in the U.S., and is the standard method of radio communication in space.

 

Some of their questions included:

What types of microorganisms are dangerous in space?
What type of medical testing is required of an astronaut to be fit for duty?
How are you able to get the internet in space and send information back and forth to Earth?
How do you handle medical emergencies?

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Markley van Camp Robbins

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