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ARISS school contact in Hungary today
(updated students' questions)

An International Space Station Expedition 17 ARISS school contact has been planned with participants from the European Space Camp 2008 at the Zanka Children and Youth Centre, near Lake Balaton, Zanka, Hungary on 24 July. The event is scheduled to begin at approximately 18:56 UTC, which is 20:56 CET.

The contact will be a direct contact between onboard station OR41SS and ground station HA5KHC. The contact should be audible all over Europe. Interested parties are invited to listen in on the 145.800 MHz downlink. The participants are expected to conduct the conversation in English.

This radio contact will be made from the European Space Agency's Space Camp, from Hungary. One hundred-twenty children of ESA staff members from various European countries, between the ages of 8 and 17, interested in science and sports are participating. This year they're learning about Earth Observation. Helped by Hungarian radio amateurs, they would like to know more about astronauts' lives.

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

1. What kind of earth observation experiments do you do from the space station?

2. What is the most beautiful or interesting thing that you have seen looking down at Earth?

3. Does weightlessness make you feel sick or ill?

4. I read you are a diver. How does diving compare to weightlessness in space?

5. How do you feel sleeping in the ISS? In which part of the station do you sleep? Do you have a separate cabin for sleeping?

6. Do you see the stars through the windows? Do they look different than from Earth?

7. How often do you have to do a cleaning-up of the station? Do you use an ordinary vacuum-cleaner? Do you wash your dishes or use disposable dishes?

8. Do you play any kind of games? Is there any game onboard specialised to weightnessless?

9. What are your special jobs as Flight Engineer and Science Officer? Did you have to solve unexpected problems?

10. Are you making any spacewalks?

11. Are the Columbus and Kibo modules already used for scientific experiments? Do you do experiments? Do you like experiments or engineering tasks better?

12. How much free time do you have in a week? Is there an internet and phone access to your family and friends in your free time? Do you answer fan letters?

The audio for this event will tentatively be fed into the EchoLink AMSAT (101 377) and JK1ZRW (277 208) servers.

Please note that there are automatic breaks in the EchoLink audio transmission every 2.5 minutes during the event and while we listen to preparations going on for this contact. Each audio break is approximately 1 second long. Please configure your systems to not time out during times of inactivity or ongoing audio transmissions.

Gaston Bertels, ON4WF
ARISS-Europe chairman