US astronaut Clay Anderson KD5PLA

ARISS contact with World Scout Jamboree a success

On Saturday August 4th 2007, astronaut Clay Anderson KD5PLA talked from the International Space Station with scouts at the 21st World Scout Jamboree in Chelmsford, England.

The radio contact started at 21:12 UTC and the exchanges went on for 10 minutes with excellent conditions.

Special ground station GB100J was operated by Howard Long G6LVB while Carlos Eavis G0AKI was at the mike and conducted operations. Paul Joosten PA5UL established an Internet connection and fed the audio of the contact into Skype so that the signals could be relayed over EcholInk by Graham Lawton G7EVY.

Clay answered all the 20 questions prepared by the scouts. He confirmed he had been a 1st class scout himself and said he decided to become an astronaut when he was 8 years old and saw Apollo disappear behind the moon and come out 15 minutes later.

Howard G6LVB also provided streaming video of the event. A video file and an mp3 audio file will be appended to this Bulletin archived on www.ariss-eu.org/archive.htm

Congratulations to the scouts for their Centenary Jamboree and many thanks to the ARISS team for their outstanding performance.

ARISS is an international educational outreach program partnering the participating space agencies, NASA, Russian Space Agency, ESA, CNES, JAXA, and CSA, with the AMSAT and IARU organizations from participating countries.

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Gaston Bertels
ARISS-Europe chairman