An educational radio contact is planned with McConnell Middle School, Loganville, GA, multi-point telebridge via ON4ISS. A multi-point telebridge contact means that each student will be on the telebridge from their own home: the students will be talking with the ISS from their homes over phone lines.
The ISS callsign is presently scheduled to be OR4ISS and the scheduled astronaut is Chris Cassidy KF5KDR Contact is go for: Wed 07 October 2020, 14:15:55 UTC, 82 deg. Downlink signals will be audible over Western Europe on 437.525 MHz narrowband FM; contact will be in english. RX only! (Credit: AMSAT.)
*** Downlink frequency on UHF instead of VHF was chosen in order to avoid interference with SSTV operations on VHF. ***
Watch for livestream
Proposed questions generated by the McConnell Middle School students:
1. Are there special activities designed for you to help relieve the stress of living and working in space?
2. Describe what surprised you about earth when you got to the ISS.
3. Do you see evidence of the recent West Coast wildfires or other environmental situations?
4. As a middle school student what can we do to prepare ourselves for the job you do today as an astronaut?
5. In the movie The Martian, Mark was trained as a botanist. What is your area of interest and what experiments are you doing in your field?
6. How long is your mission and how do you expect it might impact your body?
7. What was the hardest part of training prior to going to space?
8. How often do you need to do repairs on the outside of the ISS?
9. Describe your medical training that would help if an astronaut becomes ill or seriously injured while on the space station.
10. Standard air pressure on earth is 1 atmosphere. What air pressure do they try to maintain on the ISS?
11. What qualifications do you have that enable you to be assigned to more than one mission or similar?
12. Have you ever tried growing carrots or root vegetables in space?
13. Are there any times where any shipments of food or drinks are running late, or have space flight troubles, and you run out of food or water for the time?
14. How does food taste when you don’t get to smell it?
15. How is the ISS designed in case of a collision with space junk or a meteoroid?
16. What is the procedure if spills, liquid or solid, occur during experiments?
17. How do you maintain clean hygiene while in space?
18. What is your normal schedule on the ISS?