As part of International Education Week, students involved in the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) will have the opportunity to speak with NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Kevin Ford on board the International Space Station. Via a live downlink, students will ask Williams and Ford questions about living and working in space.
SSEP is an on-orbit educational research opportunity that allows students to design and send experiments to the space station. It is a program of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education undertaken in partnership with NanoRacks, LLC. Williams has been involved in activating the latest round of SSEP experiments brought to the station aboard the SpaceX Dragon in October.
The 20-minute ISS downlink will take place 11:45AM - 12:05PM.
National Air and Space Museum Director Gen. J. R. “Jack” Dailey, Smithsonian Assistant Secretary for Education and Access Claudine Brown, Deputy U.S. Secretary of Education Tony Miller, and NASA Associate Administrator for Education Leland Melvin are also expected to participate in this live webcast.
This image of the International Space Station and the docked space shuttle Endeavour, flying at an altitude of approximately 220 miles, was taken by Expedition 27 crew member Paolo Nespoli from the Soyuz TMA-20 following its undocking on May 23, 2011 (USA time). The pictures are the first taken of a shuttle docked to the International Space Station from the perspective of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Onboard the Soyuz were Russian cosmonaut and Expedition 27 commander Dmitry Kondratyev; Nespoli, a European Space Agency astronaut; and NASA astronaut Cady Coleman. Coleman and Nespoli were both flight engineers. The three landed in Kazakhstan later that day, completing 159 days in space.