An International Space Station school contact has been planned the ISS R&D Conference in San Francisco, CA with participating students of Quest Institute for Quality Education in San Jose, CA on 26 July. The event is scheduled to begin at approximately 20:22 UTC. It is recommended that you start listening approximately 10 minutes before this time. The duration of the contact is approximately 9 minutes and 30 seconds. The contact will be a telebridge between NA1SS and VK5ZAI. The contact should be audible over Australia and adjacent areas. Interested parties are invited to listen in on the 145.80 MHz downlink. The contact is expected to be conducted in English.

Valley Christian Schools is committed to a Quest for ExcellenceT in all of its educational programs and provides a comprehensive kindergarten through twelfth grade curriculum with a rigorous college preparatory program and challenges youth to aspire toward lives of character, service and influence while pursuing their individual Quests for Excellence.

Since 2011, The Quest Institute ISS Partner Program has successfully trained over 700 students from more than 20 schools, both public and private, from the United States and abroad. Accolades have come from four US presidents, multiple senators, actor Tom Hanks, and four US NASA astronauts. Students have presented their scientific results at the Cal Poly Space Conference, ASGSR, and at Lockheed Martin.

The Quest Institute for Quality Education developed the ISS Partner Program in partnership with Valley Christian School's AMSE Institute. It is designed to help schools start a very unique space STEM program in their learning environment. This program has a duration of one school year and can be structured to be an after-school program or a classroom program, both of which have been successful in the past for ISS Partner Schools

The program begins with a one-week comprehensive summer training program for your teachers at the Quest Institute's headquarters advanced STEM facilities of Valley Christian Schools' Skyway Campus in San Jose, California. During the summer, students prepare for the ISS program by doing a self-paced learning kit that teaches them basic electronics and basic programming skills. By the time school begins in the fall, both the students and teachers are trained to start selecting, designing, building, and testing an ISS experiment. A ground-based control unit is made and its results are compared with an identical unit sent to the ISS, working in microgravity.

The program is designed to work optimally for a group of 8-12 junior high or high school students. The students work with two teacher/mentors that guide the students from the beginning to the end of the project. They typically meet for about 4 hours per week from the start of the school year to approximately early March, when the experiment must be ready to ship to NASA after the Quest Institute checks all experiments for a "go status" to the ISS.

Participants will ask as many of the following questions as time allows:

1. If a doctor was to perform medical procedures on the ISS such as a surgery, how would the procedure be different due to the environmental

complications?

2. What is the most significant factor in designing a microgravity experiment aboard the ISS?

3. We know the ISS is in micro-gravity while it orbits the earth. Do astronauts experience free fall as you might on a roller coaster?"

4. How will AI contribute or interfere with the ISS missions?

5. What were your thoughts when you first arrived aboard the ISS?

6. What inspired you to become an astronaut?

7. What is it like being in zero gravity?

8. What made you want to live on the ISS?

9. What major technological innovations do you think could come from research conducted on the ISS, and how can it benefit mankind and the earth?

10. What is it like transitioning from the ISS back to earth?

11. What can High School students do to help the ISS and space exploration as a whole?

12. If you could sum up the importance of the ISS to mankind and the world, what would you say it consists of?

13. How do you feel about students launching experiments aboard the ISS?

14. How does the ISS contribute to the environmental issues facing our modern society today?

15. Does living on the space station feel humbling in the sense that there is a whole galaxy outside your window and Earth is only a small part of it?

16. Have you ever looked at or been fascinated by any particular junior high or high school student's experiments which have flown aboard the ISS?

PLEASE CHECK THE FOLLOWING FOR MORE INFORMATION ON ARISS UPDATES:

Visit ARISS on Facebook. We can be found at Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS).

To receive our Twitter updates, follow @ARISS_status

Next planned event(s):

1. Nepal Astronomical Society (NASO), Kathmandu, Nepal, telebridge via W6SRJ

The ISS callsign is presently scheduled to be NA1SS

The scheduled astronaut is Ricky Arnold KE5DAU

Contact is a go for: Tue 2018-07-31 08:01 UTC

About ARISS:

Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) is a cooperative venture of international amateur radio societies and the space agencies that support the International Space Station (ISS). In the United States, sponsors are the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation (AMSAT), the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The primary goal of ARISS is to promote exploration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) topics by organizing scheduled contacts via amateur radio between crew members aboard the ISS and students in classrooms or informal education venues. With the help of experienced amateur radio volunteers, ISS crews speak directly with large audiences in a variety of public forums. Before and during these radio contacts, students, teachers, parents, and communities learn about space, space technologies, and amateur radio. For more information, see www.ariss.org, www.amsat.org, and www.arrl.org.

Thank you & 73,

David - AA4KN

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