Remember that contact people at schools can be quite mobile. The move on, quit teaching, retire, some die. What happens to answers is an unknown. Even for questions at the first 7 contacts don’t have them listed in the database.
I’m not saying not to try but this is daunting. As Frank Bauer points out it’s something in the queue and had been discussed.
I suggest that we would start compiling the questions. Divide them up by year and distribute them to volunteers. Start with some type of agreement on the format of a data base. And start copying and pasting. A plan to recover answers could be developed as we work forward. Working backwards may result in faster dividends. I suggest that some questions will be redundant enough that we weed out like and similar questions and fit them with the best answer (read this as authentic and correct even if responded at a different time).
In some respects it will be similar to genealogy research, there will be dead ends that might be fillable with collaborative data.
Just considering the time to find read and the copy and paste data collected over the past 18 years is daunting and not for faint of heart or those with short attention spans. Can it be done? Sure. But we’ll need to be persistent and patient.
73 EMike
EMike McCardel, AA8EM Rotating Editor AMSAT News Service Sent from my iPhone
On Jul 4, 2018, at 5:08 PM, "k6vug@sbcglobal.net" k6vug@sbcglobal.net wrote:
I just got back from watching the parade in our city, wow what a show !
Charlie, it is wonderful to meet you and to get your offer to help us out. Yes that would be great start, in all fairness, we'd have to give credit to the student and their school for their questions.
Based on my rough calculations it is NOT a daunting task... Here are some stats I found ( ref https://www.amsat.org/amsat/ariss/news/arissnews.txt ) a) School contacts started in 2000 and there are a total of 1236 sessions to date b) Assuming a 10 minute usable time for one pass and one Q/A per minute we are looking at 12360 interactions c) At 1 line of text per question and 3 lines per answer we will be looking at roughly 12360 times 4 = 50000 lines of text - that is probably less than one day's interaction on this BBS (hi!)
So, it's no big deal, and it gets better when we look at the following things working to our benefit - a) time is on our side, (as long as we K.I.S.S.) b) questions are submitted in advance (so Charlie AJ9N may already have those), c) for the answers that we don't have, the school contact person may be in Charlie's list, so we can request them for any record of their sessions they may have, d) we can request ARISS & NASA admin to let the astronauts, when they return to Earth, to review our "Almanac" and add any missing answers at their leisure, and complete the picture. also, e) for starters, the Almanac should be a static page, (sorry no RegEx stuff please) f) later we may add pictures, cross references, related items and/or a public comments section, but only as long as the underlying web platform permits it without increasing our work-load. g) this could be hosted as a sub-domain of ARISS or AMSAT websites, thus isolating one from the other of any design changes or content updates,
After a lifetime in hi-tech, if there is one thing I have realized is that WE techies have to pave the road for our future generations, and a nice soft road for the little minds to wander on. :)
Initial set of action items I think will be -
- get sign-off and/or no objections from all stake-holders like AMSAT, ARISS, NASA, etc., (who can help ?)
- review what we can get from Charlie's files (I'll take this one)
- work with AMSAT-IT or ARISS-IT teams to figure out the right implementation style (will need some help here)
JoAnne, I saw your response, thank you, we'll need all the help we can get ! Charlie, if you like you can send me a link to your shareable files for action item (2), thank you !
Today we are looking at the experiences of the ISS crew, in a few years it may be settlers on the Moon or even Mars.
73!Umeshk6vug
On Wednesday, July 4, 2018, 9:48:41 AM PDT, aj9n@aol.com wrote:
Hi all, I am the ARISS Op who keeps track of everything, posts the first public domain info, and who maintains the private ARISS stuff. So I have just about everything I think people are looking for. except for the crew replies. For those, one would need to get a copy of the video or audio that was recorded by the school. Some of us ARISS mentors get a copy from the school, sometimes we don't. For some schools, they are barely able to have a contact, so it is debatable if they also have recording equipment. I have zero time (I average 2 to 3 hours every day maintaining all of the ARISS stuff) to crank out a list of the questions asked but if someone wants to look at what the schools were going to ask, then I can provide that. Now that I retired for the second time, maybe I will have time to get back on HF or the satellites. I don't even remember when I was on HF last. I am willing to zip file what are really the files that I post to AMSAT-BB (which makes them in the public domain) and put to DropBox or email them directly; they are my working copies that have a date and time stamp as part of the file name. Someone could go into each file and retrieve the questions that were to be asked. As has been stated by someone, not all get answered. And often times there are a few extra questions that get asked on the fly which would not be in my lists. Fortunately, we do eventually get the questions from Russia but often times that is after the fact, so they may not be in the announcements. My rough math on the number is somewhere close to 26000 ARISS questions. Comments? 73,Charlie Sufana AJ9NOne of the ARISS mentors
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