Students in the Riverhead School District have been waiting patiently for two years to talk to the astronauts as part of the Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) program. They got their questions ready, had a year-long study on space, visited a travelling space museum, built their own model of the space station, practiced with the radio club and WAITED and are still waiting for their turn to talk directly with ISS via amateur radio.

“Our turn is coming soon,” reports RHS science teacher Bob Jester. “We’re moving up on the list.”

In the meantime, ARISS has sponsored a program they’ve dubbed “School Spacewalk”. They invited schools to send in a one page piece of artwork that shows some of the artwork that students have developed as part of their participation in the program.

With only a day to spare, we lowered the model space station that was made by Riley Avenue students that has been hovering for a year in the lobby of the Aquebogue School, and sent the jpg off to ARISS which will then be placed on a compact disk and delivered to Russia in late June. The CD will then be flown to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhtstan where it will be placed inside a Russian spacesuit which will go into space as part of the cargo on a Progress supply rocket flight now set for August.

According to ARISS, “With diminishing storage space aboard the International Space Station, several Russian Orlan spacesuits used for spacewalks have been declared surplus.”

One of them will be equipped as an Amateur Radio satellite---possibly including a camera in the helmet area--and launched during a space walk in mid-September. Once deployed, the spacesuit will orbit the Earth for several weeks until it burns up as it enters the Earth’s atmosphere. HOW COOL IS THAT!