24 April 2007
SUNITA WILLIAMS TALKS WITH ITALIAN SCHOOL IN VARESE
Monday 23 April 2007
at 14:50 UTC, i.e. 16:50 local time, the “Scuola Europea Varese” in Varese, Italy, established a telebridge contact with US astronaut Sunita Williams, KD5PLB, onboard
the International Space Station, via the ARISS Ground Station VK4KHZ in Australia operated by Shane Lynd. Will Marchant was the moderator of the contact.
The Scuola Europea Varese is an
international co-educational day school for students from pre-school at age 4
to graduation at age 18. The school has more than 1300 students from all over Europe.
Varese
is located about 50 km northwest of Milan,
close to the Lake Maggiore
and the Swiss border. The aims of the European School Varese
are to give pupils confidence in their own cultural identity and the bedrock
for their development as European citizens, to develop skills in foreign
languages such as Italian, French, English, German and Dutch, and to encourage
a European and global perspective overall and particularly in the study of the
human sciences.
Students of different ages have been
involved at different level and in different ways in the programming of the
ARISS event. Drawings, plays, researches and multimedia products have been
produced and collected and were on show the day of the contact; the main topics
are the Earth, the Solar System, the Universe, the natural forces such as
gravity, etc.
The questions were read by the students.
Alessandro Minuti,
contact coordinator for this ISS contact, decided in favour of a bridge
contact. He did a very good job because the students were very well prepared. The
audience in the shack room was about 300 people. Italian ARISS mentor Francesco
De Paolis, IKØWGF set up a live streaming on the
AMSAT Italia website.
At exactly 14:50 UTC, right on schedule, contact with NA1SS was established by VK4KHZ.
Astronaut Sunita Williams answered 16 questions on
various topics. The astronaut explained for example why they cannot take a
shower onboard the ISS. The signal from the ISS was sometimes a bit
unintelligible at the school’s contact site. After the 16th question, the
signal was lost.
The newspapers Corriere
Della Sera, Varese News and Prealpina
and the two TV-stations Rete 55 and Tele 7 Laghi covered the event.
Congratulations to the Scuola Europea Varese team!
73, Peter Kofler, IN3GHZ, ARISS mentor