Students at Lincoln Middle School will experience a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity this Thursday, Nov. 15: taking part in a live teleconference and video conference with the International Space Station (ISS) from 8:30 a.m. to 11 a.m.
The school was selected because some of its students, who were in eighth grade at Lincoln MS last year and are now at Santa Monica High School, had their science experiment involving silly putty chosen to be recreated on the ISS.
The teleconference, which is part of the Student Spaceflight Experiment Program (SSEP), provides communities across America the opportunity to connect with the International Space Station.
SSEP – a joint venture between the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE), NASA, and the U.S. Department of Education – is a national Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education initiative that gives typically 300 plus students across a community the ability to design and propose real microgravity experiments to fly in low Earth orbit.
For the 80- to 90-minute teleconference program on Thursday, SSEP will be hosting a live video-conference from the National Air and Space Museums Moving Beyond Earth gallery, where they will connect up to 25 venues across the US and Canada, reflecting the SSEP communities participating in the event.
As a community venue, Lincoln MS will receive a live video and audio feed from the gallery, where invited guests will be presenting, including Astronaut Leland Melvin, and other experts and dignitaries on education, human space flight, and space science.
For a 25 minute period during the event, the Smithsonian will patch NASA’s live VIDEO and audio from the International Space Station into the gallery, and to all community venues. Viewers will see and hear astronauts Kevin Ford and Sunita Williams live.
Each community venue, including Lincoln MS, will be given the opportunity to ask one question of the astronauts via the 25 minute video conference. For the community asking a question, their live audio and video feed will be patched to the gallery and to all the community venues. The astronauts will not be able to receive a video feed, but they will hear all questions.
The program will take place within the period 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. PST on Nov. 15. This program, in addition to being a video-conference, will also be webcast by the National Air and Space Museum and NASA TV, allowing audiences across the nation and internationally to view the entire event. Click here to watch the webcast on Nov. 15: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html.
