Schoolkids set for radio rendezvous with space station
Published Friday November 28th, 2008
SAINT JOHN - At precisely 2:20 p.m. next Thursday, as the International Space Station orbits Earth at nearly 45,000 kilometres an hour, a group of students will be waiting breathlessly for it to pass over Kentucky.
That's when they will begin to try to make contact with the orbiting laboratory.
"NA1SS this is Victor Echo 9 Lima Charlie calling for scheduled contact," ham operator Greg d'Entremont will begin.
If everything goes according to plan - and d'Entremont is confident that it will - space station commander Mike Fincke will answer and 20 students from Quispamsis Middle and Quispamsis Elementary School will have the opportunity of a lifetime: The chance to interview an astronaut while he's in outer space.
They have a nine-minute window in which to chat with Fincke via ham radio before his voice fades out as the vehicle passes over Greenland.
The opportunity hasn't presented itself overnight; it's been three years since d'Entremont, a member of the Loyalist City Amateur Radio Club, and his wife listened, by accident, to a group of children in the United States talking to the space station. Their ham radio, which was sitting in their kitchen, had picked it up via a system called Internet Radio Relay Protocol (IRLP).
"My wife was just shocked that it could be done. We just happened to be listening in and I started looking into how to do this," d'Entremont said.
Since that day, d'Entremont has been working up to the point at which he could apply to NASA to take part in the program.
"It's not just making a phone call," he said.
"There are prerequisite steps you need to do to prove that you can pull it off. Then you do the application and it goes through a vetting process to make sure you have all the equipment in place," he said.
D'Entremont made an 11-page application in October of 2007 and was told last spring that he had made the grade.
In November, came the news that they would be speaking to the space station sometime in December; then, a couple of weeks ago, he was given a timeframe of days.
Last week, they were told contact would be made on Dec. 4 and, finally, it came down to 2:23 p.m. - that's the precise time students will begin asking questions.
On Saturday, he will install two separate radio and antennae systems at Quispamsis Middle School, where the exercise is being held. On the day students make contact, the antennae, which will be mounted on the roof, will be shown via big screen to the crowd gathered in the auditorium; one will move back and forth as it tracks the space station which, in turn, will be monitored via computer software and shown on a second big screen.
Students' questions range from queries about the space station's robot, Dexter, to what the Earth feels and smells like after you've been floating around in space for months.
Grade 5 student Alexandra d'Entremont, Greg's daughter, wants to know what astronauts do in their spare time.
"There's no gravity in space, so you can practically float up there," she said. "It's exciting to have the opportunity to talk to astronauts.
Her classmate, Isaac Belliveau, who thinks he might become a physicist when he grows up, wants to know if there was anything or anyone who inspired Fincke.
"I'm excited. It's once in a lifetime," he says of the opportunity.
A couple of years ago, d'Entremont brought his radio system to Quispamsis Elementary School and Valerie Conrod's Grade 5 class was able to listen to students in Belgium talking to astronauts at the space station. All of the students involved in next Thursday's space talk have been science students of Conrod's at one time or another.
"One of the questions that really grabbed me was when one of the kids in Belgium asked the astronaut if he could see pollution as they went over China," Conrod said.
"Our kids went silent. He said, 'sadly, as we've just moved away from China, I can.'
"The thing for me, as a teacher, is when would you have such an amazing opportunity to make science real?"
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