Latest changes to ARISS Ops for selected pages as of 2022-04-09 at 04:00 UTC.  Not all are listed but these are the ones that tend to change often.

Index as of 2022-04-09 at 0400 UTC

Scheduled events and school contacts as of 2022-04-09 at 04:00 UTC

Completed events and school contacts as of 2022-04-07 at 20:30 UTC

Schools waiting as 2022-04-05 at 20:30 UTC

Archived Schools as of 2022-04-05 at 20:30 UTC

Failed Schools as of 2021-08-03 at 16:00 UTC

Frequencies as of 2022-03-17 02:30 UTC

Contact information as of 2019-04-05 19:00 UTC

Reference material for public use as of 2022-04-07 20:30 UTC

Reference material for private use as of 2022-01-14 17:00 UTC

Presentations as of 2020-10-22 03:00 UTC

List of weekly ARISS mentor telecon participants.  Now includes list of US ARISS Educational Ambassadors (AEA) as of 2020-02-09 21:00 UTC

Reminder: The weekly ARISS mentor telecon is at 21:00 UTC on Wednesdays.  We will be using GoToMeeting.

Week 3: added a livestream URL for Greater St. Albert Catholic Schools École Secondaire St. Albert Catholic High School, St. Albert, AB, Canada, telebridge via IK1SLD, Contact is go for Option #3: Mon 2022-04-11 15:50:31 UTC 33 deg via IK1SLD

Week 4: uploaded questions for Bellefontaine High School, Bellefountaine, Ohio, direct via W8BCS

Just a heads up; this Friday (April 8) to Sunday (April 10), Karen and I will be up in Indianapolis for a wedding of one of Karen’s cousins.  We get in Friday evening, get up early Saturday to get up to Purdue to see the grand opening of the new Vet hospital, hightail back to Indy for the late afternoon wedding, meet up with the relatives Sunday for brunch, and get home late Sunday night.   So the odds of getting near-real-time updates done for ARISS Ops will not be very high.

Mentors, if you send me an updated file for anything, please change the file name to either have an updated date or revision number as part of the file name.  Lately I have been getting updated files that were a repeat of a repeat of an earlier file name.  This way I know what version is what and so I know that you know what version is being sent.  Depending on the situation I may revise the file name which means it might be out of synch with your filing system.  If you haven’t figured it by now, for the last 20+ years the uplink file names get changed with every revision.  Every application file name is changed if there is a revision.  And for all of the html files, there is an updated date and time indicated somewhere within the file.

If you think you want to update an uplink and then send it to me for uploading; I am sort of OK with that but I do have limits.  Please change the file name to reflect the latest date and change the first line within the uplink itself (to the nearest half hour in UTC time is close enough).  Otherwise, I will change those and you might not be in synch with me.  Please be aware that there are certain formats that we follow within the uplink.  So if you elect to edit an uplink and send it to me, then make sure you follow what is in the formatting.  It is actually better for me to take your raw data and put it into the correct format since sometimes it took me longer to clean up something I received than it would have if I just did it.

Mentors, I really don’t want to get an email that says change this option number to this one.  Send me a new complete list of all of the options.  Also, I want a complete list of the names and questions if there is a change to even just one.  If there is to be an editorial change in an application or proposal, you or the school make the change, not me and send me the updated version.  It is not my job to fix a school’s mistake and I am starting to get more and more of these types of changes.  Make sure that your schools have completely reviewed their own calendar before sending in the prioritized options.  That means looking at the week or day ahead of the contact week; maybe even the few days after.

When you send me the prioritized options, put a number at the beginning of each line indicating the prioritized number.  Lately I have been getting the options just put in some sort of order with no option number and I am to guess that they are to be sequenced.  Tell your school to put a number if you don’t want to do it yourself.  This is basically a doublecheck for me but more importantly it allows you and the school to realize any mistakes (like duplicated options).

If your school is going to do a live stream, then make sure I receive the entire URL for the contact.  That means I want the URL for even the ARISS YouTube produced contacts.  I am not going to attempt to remember what URL was used last.  Things tend to change on the fly around here and since I am not in on every email or voice conversation where something might get changed, I need to get whatever URL is going to be used.  I don’t care if the URL has been used for the 1000th time, just pass along what is going to be used.  Then I do not have to guess.  If there is going to be a change in the URL, then please tell me if it is replacing an existing link or if it is in addition to an existing link.  I can’t guess at what you are doing, so you have to tell me.

Several things for you to tell the schools when it is time to get the story and questions.  You would not believe the amount of time I have had to do at times because some school did not follow some pretty simple rules on how I want to see the story and questions.  We have a specific format that is used for the uplink files that is based on crew comments and ARISS review.  So please make sure your school does it correctly in the first place.  Otherwise, I may send it back for either the mentor to fix (and see what I have to go through sometim4:es) or send it back to the school to fix.  This also means that the mentor should actually look at what a school sent them before sending something to me rather than just forwarding on a file to me.

1.  File name.  Plain old simple text (TXT) works best.  But if you have a story or questions that are using something like French, where there are lot of accent marks for the letters; please also send me an RTF file.  I can handle just about any file format, but TXT and RTF are pretty universal in nature.  Languages like Russian or Japanese might not lend themselves very well to using a TXT file, so also send me an RTF.  I will figure out what actually works best for the uplink.

2.  Turn off all the automatic formatting stuff.  The means Bullet Library=None, Numbering Library=None, List Library=None.  Also, never use tabs.  Different programs pick up the tab locations differently and can cause all sorts of issues.

3.  Use Align Left.

4.  Turn off the idea of forcing carrier returns to just keep the maximum line length to something like 80 characters.  I remove all of those and let it wrap to the next line.

5.  Do not use all capital letters for the student names.  I know that is what is done in some countries, but I end up changing that to have just the first letter capitalized.

6.  The formatting for the questions is to be this:

SequenceNumber. FirstName (age or grade):  Question?           Note the use of ( ) and the colon after the ).  Note that there is a period after the SequenceNumber, then a space before the name.  I usually put in 2 spaces after the colon.  If you have 2 or more students with the same first name, then give me the last name or the last name initial; for example, Bob Smith or Bob S. would be just fine.  Again, I will figure out what the end result will look like.

HERE IS WHAT I DO NOT WANT TO SEE.  This really takes up time to correct.  DO NOT USE A TABLE FOR THE QUESTIONS.  Here is what I usually get if a table is used:

| 1 | Question? | Name | Age or grade | | 2 | Question? | Name | Age or grade | | 3 | Question? | Name | Age or grade | | 4 | Question? | Name | Age or grade |

What I usually must do is go into each line to merge the cells for that row, then copy/paste, then re-arrange so that the name and age/grade are before the question.  Again, we are using a very specific format for the uplink file.  So, anything you can do at the beginning makes it easier on me at the end of the process.

Here is what the table eventually gets converted to:

1. Name (Age or grade):  Question?

2. Name (Age or grade):  Question?

3. Name (Age or grade):  Question?

4. Name (Age or grade):  Question?

I also do not want to see the questions like this:

SequenceNumber. Question? Name (age or grade)

7.  The use of PDF files.  About 95% of the time, I have no problems using a file that comes in as a PDF.  Sometimes I think people feel it is easier, but in reality, sometimes it is way more difficult to use.  The cases where neither of my PDF programs allowed me to do a copy from the PDF into the Word file, I had to hand enter the data into the uplink file.  Sometimes I might get lucky and one of my PDF programs will save it as a Word file, but that may mean I still have to do some cleanup before getting it into the uplink.  The PDF files that usually give me a problem are ones where something was handwritten, scanned, and then saved as PDF or ones that were type written, scanned, and were actually crooked.  So, I would actually prefer receiving a TXT or RTF file than a PDF if possible.  I tend to have no issues if a file was printed using the Microsoft Print to PDF feature.  But you have seen for the last zillion years, I will do what is needed to get the data.

Stay safe everyone!

73,

Charlie AJ9N