Erika: Well, hello everyone. Welcome to Station Update, the news program just for students about the International Space Station. I'm Erika Guillory, and we're coming live from the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and we're celebrating National Engineers Week. We've got a great program lined up for you today, so let's take a look at what's coming up.

Our student report, Yvette Johnson, shows us how science fiction is becoming science fact. We'll get a clear picture of the EarthKAM Project with engineer, Brion Au. Our Station Update correspondent, Lori Keith, joins us as one of the coolest engineering jobs at NASA. We'll put our hard-hats on for the cool experiment of the day, and we'll log on to the Web site Pick of the Month.

We've got all of this coming up today,

but first you know the next scheduled space shuttle mission is actually this Thursday. The mission won't be visiting the International Space Station, as a matter of fact astronauts will travel a little farther to the Hubbell Space Telescope.

The Hubbell servicing mission will mark the first mission of Space Shuttle Columbia after the vehicle has spent two years being upgraded and refurbished. The mission will mark the beginning of Columbia's third decade flying in space. STS109 will be the 108^th mission of Space Shuttle Columbia.

Well another great turning point in space history is of course the International Space Station. What used to be the pages of science fiction is now becoming reality. As a matter of fact our student reporter, Yvette Johnson, has more.

Sorry about that program. Yvette Johnson is with the Jack Yates School of Communications here in Houston. We appreciate that report. We're having some audio difficulties. We'll try to work that out in just a little while and see if we can get that report to you.

The idea of an orbiting city is pretty cool, and that's exactly what the International Space Station is. But you know we've been working on the International Space Station for a long time trying to build it. As a matter of fact we've got a long way to go, but just the other day our astronauts did a space walk, and we'd like to take you there just to talk a little bit about what the space walk is all about.

As a matter of fact astronauts, Carl, Walt and Dan Berts, space station astronauts, completed a successful five hour, 47 minute space walk. And that was last Wednesday. It was the first space walk from the Quest airlock with the space shuttle docked to the space station. Now the two astronauts tested equipment and they performed other tasks preparing for STS110 when Space Shuttle Atlantis will visit the International Space Station.

Now scientists are using the space walk also to gather additional data for an experiment looking at the effects of space walks and what the effects of microgravity have on the lungs. And that's pretty interesting.

Well what if you had the opportunity to see what the astronauts see. There are some students that are actually doing just that. As a matter of fact with us today we have a special guest, and it is engineer, Brion Au. Well welcome the program, Brion.

Brion: Good morning, Erika.

Erika: Absolutely. Well Brion's going to talk to us a little bit about EarthKAM and what it's like to be an engineer for NASA.

Brion: That's great. Glad to be here, and being an engineer at NASA is quite an experience. The community here is very, very professional and job motivation is definitely not a problem.

The EarthKAM project that I work on is a camera system that's installed on the Station that the astronauts set up for us, and we command that from the ground. We allow students on the ground to actually send files to the University of California at San Diego that tells the camera when to take pictures.

How I got here started along time ago back when I was in high school. Went to college for a couple of years. Joined the Air Force and I spent 25 years in the Air Force. And I had a good time doing that. Continued on through school, eventually graduated, and after I retired from the Air Force I was looking for a job, and obviously going to work at NASA is a very, very exciting place to work. And I applied and was accepted at a company called Johnson Engineering.

Since then I had worked on projects for hardware that goes in the multipurpose logistics module to carry equipment up and to and from the Station, and since then I have transitioned over into managing the EarthKAM project.

Erika: Okay. Now let's talk a little bit about EarthKAM. Now I mentioned earlier that it's actually a way for students to see exactly what the astronaut sees, so talk to us a little bit about EarthKAM and how the students can get involved in that project.

The EarthKAM project was actually started by Sally Ride several years ago, and what students can do to actually participate in a space mission is to log onto the EarthKAM Web page, and we'll show that in a little bit,

and they actually become certified to start commanding the images and then from there, as part of the certification process, teaches them how to correlate where the space station is overhead to targets that are directly underneath it.

Erika: And students are able to see, we had popped up there, that was actually our Web site pick of the month. So we hope that students, that you will be able to log on after our program today and get a chance to see what EarthKAM is all about. Thank you, Brion.

Brion. Great. Thank you.

Erika: Well, you know, also one of the things I want to mention to students before we continue with Station Update today is that if you would like to send in some more questions, we'd like to make, we're having a few technical problems today, so thank you for your patience, and we would like you to send your questions in to: Questteam@hotmail.com. That's questteam@hotmail.com, just start sending your questions in and we'll get to them.

Brion: You bet. Great.

Erika: So Brion, I understand that you have a little bit more that you want to share with us about EarthKAM, so this might be a good time for us to talk a little bit about that and what the project's about.

Brion: Okay. EarthKAM, that is actually an acronym. It stands for Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle school Students. The program was put together and it's aimed at the 6^th to 8^th grade student population. That's part of an overall educational program that encompasses everything from elementary school all the way up through post graduate students.

All About EarthKAM, it's an education program that enables middle school students to actively participate in a real-time space mission. They are sending up commands to a camera that will snap a picture, and then we here at Johnson Space Center will downlink these images and return them to a Web page at the University of California at San Diego so that the students can copy these to their home school to support their individual study projects.

The key people involved in EarthKAM are, first of all, Sally Ride; she's what we call the principal investigator. She put together the program several years ago, and came up with the concept, and we flew it as a test on a couple of missions, and now we're actually operating on the space station.

The payload utilization integration lead is my boss, Patty Meyeritlewski, and she works here at Johnson Space Center. And then myself, I'm the project manager, and I handle all the day-to-day activities of EarthKAM, make sure the paperwork is done, the safety certifications are in place, so that when the crew actually uses the payload system, it's able to function onboard.

We've got a very long flight history, and we first flew on the shuttle, on STS76, as [KidSat].

We flew that for three missions. Since then we've operated on two additional shuttle flights, STS88 and 89, as EarthKAM. And since increment two, springtime of 2001, we operate now on the International Space Station.

Again, we've flown from STS76 to what we call operation cycles, Op Cycle 5, on the Station, commanding images involving a different numbers of schools.

The most prolific was STS99 where we had 83 schools onboard, and they commanded 2,715 images.

To date the EarthKAM library of images is up to 6,599 images.

Erika: That's amazing. You know before we started the program you and I were talking, and we were thinking this would be a great resource for students to be able to use for their homework or maybe research projects.

Brion: Most definitely. Even if they're not actively involved

in a space mission or commanding images through the EarthKAM system, the images are open to the public, they can use, students can use these, anybody can use these to copy down off the Worldwide Web to support studies or their projects that they're involved in. Yes.

Erika: All right.

Brion: The payload is actually comprised of three different hardware elements.

We've got the camera, a mounting bracket for the camera and then the IBM 760XD laptop, and this is what we call the station support computer. And on that laptop, we have one software component and that is the EarthKAM flight software.

The next picture that you see is going to be a diagram of the hardware.

It shows the camera actually connected to the laptop.

Erika: All right.

Brion: And there it is.

Erika: Oh I see.

Brion: Yeah, it's a very simple system, and it connects to the communications system on the station and we can downlink the images on that almost near real time. And then following the hardware, then you'll see the software. Now this is what the crew looks at when they set us up on the laptop computer, they activate the EarthKAM software

and this is the interface that they see. And they have to set a timer on it

and them from there, we uplink files from the ground that tells the camera when to snap the pictures.

Now this correlates to the exact position over the target on the Earth. To make all this happen,

we rely on a big team here on the ground. First of all are the middle school students in schools all the way from Germany to Japan and all across the United States. They determine the targets that they're looking for to support their studies.

They log into the EarthKAM Web page and download data that allows them to track exactly where the space station is and then they send in their image request.

That goes to the University of California at San Diego.

At the UCSD, University of California at San Diego mission operations center, they direct the payload operations.

Now this is all undergrad students. They provide the support for the data on the Web page, compile all the image requests from schools across, around the world and they receive the images that we downlink from this station onto their data system, that allows the students to downlink them to their individual mission operation centers.

And the Johnson Space Center Telescience Center, this is where I sit when the mission is operational.

We work with the flight control team. This is the flight director and the payload operations director, which is located at Marshall and we coordinate all of the actions and involvement in the operating the payload.

We kind of act as a bridge between the students out at the University of California at San Diego and the flight control team here at Johnson Space Center.

The EarthKAM operations are carried out by the camera and we function with the flight control team here at Johnson Space Center, and we also work with the crew on board the space station. They have to set the equipment up and they also track some timers that we've got

and they also just check on the system.

Now here you see two pictures of some different setups that we've got. One is where we were locate just recently, and then also in increment two, in the service module, and the picture on the right is how we were set up in the U.S. lab module. And it's a very science, high-science grade quality window in the U.S. lab.

Now to make all that work, the image process starts with the schools actually requesting an image.

They send that request to UCSD which is block two. UCSD compiles all of the image requests into a camera control file. They send that to me here at Johnson Space Center and then we get that uplinked to the International Space Station.

From there, the EarthKAM flight software sees the file that gets uplinked, tells the camera when to take the pictures, and when the picture is taken, it stores it to an EarthKAM folder. From there we downlink the image, and then we archive it here. We make copies of it so we don't lose any images, then we send these images back to UCSD where it gets posted into the data system.

And then from there, students and the general public can download these images to use to support their studies or run the projects.

The image routing is kind of circuitous, it goes from let's say Johnson Space Center up to DomSAT out to White Sands, which then gets uplinked to the TEDRIS Satellite and then on to the Space Station via the KU system. And to get the images down, that actually just works in reverse.

We have just completed a very, very successful operation using the Increment 4 crew, Karl Walz and Dan Bursch, and we were able to collect over 840 images to add to our library. So we're very pleased with how the system is working and we're expecting more and more schools to come on board and learn how to command the images,

and we are operating about six times a year. So this way we can handle more schools, we can do three sessions in the fall and then three sessions in the spring. So we should have plenty of time then to incorporate more schools into our operations. Erika?

Erika: Absolutely great, Brion. Thank you so much. As a matter of fact, you'll be able to ask Brion your questions live really soon later on in the program. So get your questions ready about engineering or just EarthKAM.

So right now, I have a special guest with me.

__: Hi, I'm Ross Adams welcome to the Cool Experiment of the Day.

Erika: Absolutely, the cool experiment of the day. And since it is National Engineer's Week and we're celebrating that, we decided that we would do an experiment that kind of takes look at what the astronauts have to do in space, kind of an engineering type task. And so what do we have here?

Ross: Well what we're actually doing is we're building a model space station underwater.

Erika: Absolutely. And so for you to be able to try this at home, there's just a few things that you need, so what do we need, Ross?

Ross: All right, we need a plastic container. It doesn't matter what size, half-filled with water. We have building blocks, again it doesn't really matter what kind. We have timers, we have and

Erika: Of course, the paper towels to wipe this mess up so that you guys won't get in trouble at home with your parents. Well the whole point of this is, is that our astronauts have got to train here on Earth before they get ready to do a space walk in microgravity. And the way that we do that is underwater in our neutral buoyancy laboratory.

As a matter of fact, Ross is going to take a turn at putting on some gloves, and will kind of simulate some of the gloves that the astronauts have on and see how hard it is to actually put something together underwater. So we've got four pieces that we picked out here prior to coming on camera today. And I'm going to time him.

And so we're going to see just how long it takes Ross to put together these four pieces.

And go. Well you know, it's really interesting, everybody has to remember that the astronauts in space are working in an environment that is extremely hostile to humans. So the temperatures are ranging from 250 degrees Fahrenheit in the sunlight to minus 250 degrees in the shade. And of course there's little or no atmosphere. And so this is at 250 miles above the Earth, remember, so the astronauts have to wear their space suits.

So we train them here on Earth to be able to work in an unfamiliar way in these suits. Now it's going to be kind of cool for you to try this experiment at home, but one of the things that we really have time today is to kind of time ourselves doing this out of the water.

You can use your timers and you can time yourself doing something like this out of the water, then put your gloves on and do exactly what Ross is doing. Try to time yourself and see how easy or hard it is. So Ross is it easy or is it hard?

Ross: It's very hard.

Erika: It's very hard. What do you think is the hardest part about doing this? Is it the water or the gloves?

Ross: It's the gloves. It's hard to move around in them.

Erika: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, and his gloves are not as thick as some of the gloves that the astronauts wear. As a matter of fact, the astronauts a lot of times have to strengthen their fingers to be able to work in their gloves to make it easier for them to manipulate their fingers when they're working in space.

So I was just wondering. You finished, huh?

Ross: Yes.

Erika: And I didn't stop the watch. I'm doing really bad, but I'm going to take off about 5 seconds there and I'd say that it took him about a minute and 15 seconds. Wow. Now I bet you it would probably only would take you 30 seconds out of the water.

Ross: Probably so.

Erika: So we're going to challenge you to do that at home. I was wondering, Ross, what do you think engineers really do?

Ross: Well to sum it up, they basically plan and construct.

Erika: Plan and construct sounds great to me, but you know what? The students at Jack Yates High School actually went out into the community to find out what you think.

All right, okay, well I'll tell you what, we'll come back. I want to thank the students at Jack Yates for helping us out today. We are not getting those packages. We're having some technical difficulties and so what we're going to do at this point is we're going to go ahead and we're going to take a look at some of the cooler things.

We have Lori Keith who is our correspondent at NASA and all the different jobs that engineers get a chance to do. There's just another cool one that you might not have thought about.

Lori: Hi, I'm Lori Keith with NASA Quest. I work at the Johnson Space Center here in Houston, Texas. Today I want to share with you an area of careers for engineering you might not know about NASA flight controllers.

And we all know that scientists and astronauts are important, their jobs, but the flight controllers are the backbone of every mission. It's their job to monitor and maintain what they call the health of the vehicle, whether that vehicle is the ISS, or one of the shuttles, and if a problem arises, it is their job to figure out how to fix it or how to work around it.

Their jobs are crucial to the success of every NASA space flight mission. And on that note, I would like to introduce to

Brion M.: Hi, I'm Brion McDonald, and I'm an ISS flight controller with an aerospace engineering degree. I'm here in a historical Apollo control room where 32 years ago the Apollo 11 craft landed on the moon. And in that time, we've come a very long way. The ISS, when complete, will be the second brightest object in the night sky and will have a living area of approximately 1800 square feet.

It's my job, as an Attitude Determination and Control Officer, or ADCO, to fly the spacecraft. Now of course gravity determines where the spacecraft goes and how fast. But it's my job to make sure that we're pointed in the right direction. And that pointing or attitude is very crucial because that is what helps to maintain the power balance and maintain communications with the ground.

As an ADCO, I monitor the ISS Attitude Control System which uses control moment gyroscopes. These gyroscopes harness the power of a spinning wheel to control the attitude without the use of rocket fuel, which is expensive and difficult to transport to the space station.

Erika: Well thank you to Lori Keith for that report and to Brion MacDonald, and Mission Control. It's kind of interesting to see that the engineers here at NASA actually can be flight controllers too. And they're responsible for everything that goes on during a space shuttle mission and also for the International Space Station.

Well you know what? It is now time for you to put on your thinking caps because we have Station Trivia.

What is the name of the U.S. laboratory on Space Station? Now come on you guys, all you space junkies, I know that this will be a pretty easy question for you to answer. But we'll find out what the answer is to the Station Trivia later on in the program.

Now we are going to join Brion Au and we're going to take some of your questions. All right, Brion, are you ready for the first question?

Brion: I sure am.

Erika: Absolutely. Well let's go ahead and take a look. The very first question is coming from Kendall and Kendall is from Mrs. Crawford's 2nd grade class. We have the younger ones with us and some of the older ones so we'll get to everybody today. And the question is does the Earth look green and blue from EarthKAM?

Brion: Most definitely. Yes. We have got some images that we can show later on and the colors that the astronauts see and that the students can see through these images are just absolutely amazing. Yes, we have a complete rainbow of colors that you can see on Earth.

Erika: Okay. Daniel, in Mrs. Petersons's 4th grade class -- we're going up there, 2nd graders, 4th graders, moving on up -- can you see under the oceans from EarthKAM such as the continental shelf?

Brion: You can't see the continental shelf. It's a little bit too deep. But we do have some really, really fantastic pictures of coral reefs. We took one during STS 99, that's one of my favorites. It's just an amazing picture of the coral reefs. It's horseshoe shaped. You can actually see how the water has cut channels through the coral reef itself.

Erika: All right. Well we want to thank all of you guys for sending your questions in and actually Brion, the next question I probably can answer, or we can answer this one together. Tyler who's also in Mrs. Peterson's 4th grade class wants to know how long does it take the International Space Station to go around the world?

Well it's really every 90 minutes.

Brion: That's correct.

Erika: And what's interesting about that is that you have 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets a day. Imagine if you had to just like get up and go back to sleep that many times a day, that would just be entirely too much. And you know, one of the reasons why, is because the space station is traveling at 17,500 miles an hour. That's 5 miles a second. So you snap your fingers and wow, it's gone 5 miles already.

As a matter of fact, we have a way to keep up with it in Mission Control and this is it.

As a matter of fact, you can log on to the space Web site at NASA and see this at any time and right now you can really see where the space station is. It is actually it looks like it's right over Australia. Absolutely.

And if you check in a few minutes, it'll probably be over another continent. So that's something that you can look at at any time and see maybe when the Space Station is traveling in your backyard.

All right, well we're going to go ahead and finish some questions off with Brion. Make sure that you start typing your questions in and we have plenty of time to answer them. Rachel writes in and wants to know what do you mostly do on the Space Station?

Brion: The astronaut crew, I don't do anything. I wish I could.

Erika: You do EarthKAM.

Brion: Yes. The astronaut crew is involved in several different activities. First of all they have to take care of their house. So they've got systems that they have to maintain, filters to change, they do status checks and they also do lots of science activities to operate the payloads that have been sent up there for the crew. They've been trained on them, and they activate and operate and accomplish the science that they're supposed to during their particular mission.

Erika: Okay. Well, Rachel from Mrs. Peterson's class, this is another question. This is actually two questions, so thank you Rachel and thank you to all the questions coming in. She wants to know how do you build the EarthKAM. So I know for a fact, we talked about this, you might want to show us a little something here that you brought with us today on how that works.

Brion: This is the main component of the EarthKAM system, it's a Kodak digital camera, and this is a DCS 460. It's connected to the laptop that the astronauts have onboard, and we can also switch to different lenses. We actually have the 50 mm, the 85 mm and then the 180 mm lenses that we have the crew switch us to during our operations.

Erika: Kind of heavy.

Brion: It has mass. It's not heavy in space.

Erika: Oh right, right.

Brion: So they connect it, turn it on, and then we control it from the ground. That's the nice thing about EarthKAM is we don't take up valuable crew time to operate the payload once we're set up and operating in space.

Erika: Okay. Well that was a good question and we had something to actually show you. So thank you for that question, Rachel. Heather wants to know how many people live in the Space Station. And I can answer that. Right now we have three people living on board Space Station, and maybe in the future we will have more than that. But when the shuttle docks with Space Station, we can have up to seven additional astronauts at one time.

So seven, eight, nine, 10 total usually at one time. But living continuously, about three at a time. So good question.

Well how long can they live on the Space Station? We're getting a lot of Space Station questions here. And how long, do you know how long they can live in Space Station?

Brion: Well they like to restrict the crew to about four months, because of the microgravity effects on the body. Shannon Lucid was on board MIR on phase I programs, for a little over six months. So she currently holds the U.S. women's record for time on board a station.

Erika: Okay, and we actually have a picture of the current crew that's up there.

This is Expedition 4 and I see right there on the left side of the screen is Astronaut Dan Bursch and then we have Yuriana Frinko in the center who is commander and then on the right is our engineer Carl Walz. Expedition4 crew is Commander Yury Onufrienko and Flight Engineers Carl Walz and Dan Bursch

Very interesting, those were the two astronauts you actually saw the other day for the space walk that we showed you at the beginning of station update.

How long, or how do they take care of their bodies in space as far as hygiene? Now I have some answers to that, but I want to hear what you have to say.

Brion: This is kind of neat because when I first started working out here at Johnson Space Center, I was involved in handling a project for the crew habitation module. And actually worked somewhat on the hygiene compartment. To take care of themselves on board, they have to basically do sponge baths. They use dry wipes and shave and they have special shampoos

and so forth that actually they can add into their hair, brush it through, and it cleans the oils and so forth out of their hair.

So it's difficult, but not impossible. And it takes a little bit of getting used to. And they actually get trained on how to take care of themselves.

Erika: Okay. Well, we have another question that's coming in and it has to do with just health and things like that, aboard the Space Station and it's what do they eat on Space Station? And this is a generic question. We're kind of moving away from EarthKAM a little bit, but since you're an engineer and you're at NASA, you get a chance to answer all those cool questions.

So I actually have a surprise for you, Brion, I've brought some lunch.

Brion: Oh good.

Erika: For you to be able to eat today.

Brion: I heard that space food is

Erika: Maybe you'll sample it for us, I don't know.

Brion: ...absolutely excellent.

Erika: All right, well let's take a look at this. This is actually a sampling of what they might eat on International Space Station.

Brion: This is my favorite.

Erika: And of course he picks out something that we can get here on Earth. As a matter of fact, students, we do take some things like this. This is probably one of your favorites, chocolate pudding. It's one of ours, that's for sure. A lot of companies work with NASA and we can send up food just like this. The only thing we add is a special label.

Part of the experiment that's on board is the research done about the consumption of food. So the astronauts each have their own individual bar-code readers and they actually scan their food as they eat, so that researchers here on the ground can see what all the foods that they're eating.

This is yummy though. This is scrambled eggs. I made sure we brought this just for you. Of course not ready yet. It's kind of hard as a rock. A lot of the foods on board are dehydrated foods and so the astronauts have to add the water once again to space, and the same thing with this sausage patty here. It is also dehydrated. The reasons why, there are a couple of reasons.

One of the reasons is, is because for storage. Look how thin that is and how much we can stow and also for the fact that we want to make sure things stay fresh.

Brion: And without the water in, it weighs much less.

Erika: There you go.

Brion: And it's much cheaper to launch.

Erika: There you go. And this of course is another favorite.

Brion: Oh, the M&Ms, yes. Erika: Absolutely. It's one of the favorites for all of us actually, probably, across the world for snack food. And the one thing too is something different is this

Brion: The drink bag.

Erika: Yeah.

Brion: Yes, the drink bag. The reason they have to put stuff in a drink bag is because there's no way to contain liquids in the glass. So they're able to inject water into the bag, mix it, and then they have a straw with the valve on it that they can open, drink and then they can close again, so they don't have their drink floating all over the cabin.

Erika: Okay, well one last thing we want to state about this, all this food and things and the cool stuff that they eat in space, is the fact that they all have Velcro tabs on them. And that's because they can just fix to the tray, all these little white things you see are actually things for us to stick the Velcro on. So I have like little carpeted pieces. And here in a gravity environment they would fall off, but in space, they'd float away if they weren't attached to something, so that's what that is.

And the back part of the tray of course has something for you to put over you leg to hold on for the food to. Okay well I've got a question for you, Brion. I was just wondering, kind of getting back to the career of talking about being an engineer and if any of you are interested in what does an engineer do, how did you get interested in becoming an Engineer?

Brion: It's just something I grew up doing. I grew up kind of out in the country, and they actually built several houses around us and we were out there before development grew up. And I was able to watch them build, and my dad built lots of things. And I was always the curious kid and would take things apart and had extra parts left over when I was done.

So it was just a natural gravitation toward making things or understanding what makes things work.

Erika: Well Cathy who's in the 7th grade, and she's watching us today, she wants to know what type of-, there's all kinds of engineering degrees, so as a 7th grader she realizes this, and she wants to know what kind of engineering degree you have.

Brion: Mine is actually civil.

Erika: There are a lot of engineers that work out here at NASA, people would probably be surprised. I think that you've got to realize that there are all sorts. First of all we have people that actually study aeronautical and astro-nautical engineering. We have people that are electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, and they all work together to make the space shuttle systems work and also the International Space Station.

And there's also some other things that you may not realize that people are working on that really don't have to do with creating a vehicle for example, for the EarthKAM project is one thing that you might have to think about. Or actually how the astronauts are living inside the Space Station. Things that will make it easier. Engineers think of all those kind of things too.

Well Janice is in Mrs. Wimbly's 8th grade class, so hello to you Janice. And I guess Janice, I've got a feeling she's been reading your bio.

Brion: Oh no.

Erika: Students, if you haven't had a chance to, when you go to the Quest Web site, Brion's biography is there and you can read all about the work that he does and some of the cool things that he does.

But Janice has a question and she wants to know, do you still want to be a teacher one day? And do you remember who your favorite teacher was?

Brion: Yes, most definitely. I'm enjoying my career here at NASA just to no end. I don't even consider it work. It's so involved and exciting. It's neat, very neat to just work here. When I do finish up here, I really would like to be able to pass on the experiences that I've learned and one of the ways to do that is through teaching. So yes, I really would like to continue doing that.

Erika: Adam is actually coming from Texas and he is an 8th grader and he wants to know is there a place that they can access all the photos EarthKAM has taken. And I think we've already answered that. And that was our Web site pick of the month, and that is actually the EarthKAM site, so hopefully all of you guys will get a chance to take a look at that and see all the really cool and beautiful photos that they have there.

Now Mrs. Smallwood's 7th grade class, Lamarr wants to know how long does the application process take and is there a long lead time between application acceptance and actual participation.

Brion: Most of that is depending on how may or how much-, the resources that the school can actually apply toward the EarthKAM certification. We're trying to work that to get it down to a shorter time frame. But to partner up with other schools that actually do it, get an approved research project, will take a little bit of time. I'm not sure exactly how long it is since that's pretty much up to the team out at UCSD and I handle the hardware here.

So most of those answers can be obtained from the UCSD Web page, the EarthKAM Web page. There is a block on there that will help the teachers to do that.

Erika: Okay. This question is coming from Miami and this is Natalie and she is a 6th grader there. Is there any special equipment needed to participate in the EarthKAM mission? Now we already talked about that. But she wants to know in addition, does the project give consideration to home-schooled kids?

Brion: It's unfortunate that home-schooled children probably will not be able to command images, but they can participate if they know when we're operating. They can go to the Web page and download images as we actually get them down off of the International Space Station.

So the special equipment outside of some slider maps that have to be prepared, and you can get those from UCSD, and a computer that's connected to the Internet, that's the only special equipment that you'll need.

Erika: Okay. I know that Brion has been here to answer a lot of your questions, and I just want to make sure that we mention your name, if you typed in a question to us and even if we've already answered it, so we know we've already answered this question. And this is from Jeffrey Missouri, thank you for your question. We've already answered where is the camera control from. And also another thank you to Kammi who is from St. Louis and is an 8th grader there says read your field journal and mentioned, you mentioned Sally Ride, how is she involved, I really like her and I'm in her science club.

Brion: Super. That's great.

Erika: And that's Kammi in St. Louis. So how is she involved or is she still involved? She just got started or?

Close up of Brion

Brion: She's the principal investigator. She's actually like the CEO of EarthKAM. She sets the direction that it's going to take. I coordinate with her on when we're able to operate, and then she gets the team at UCSD set up, ready to support the schools and the actual mission.

Erika: All right. Well we have kind of a technical question here. We have an 8th grader, that's from Texas, and this is Nick. And so this is a good one for you, Brion, as an engineer. How are the geographic positions converted using math, computer programs, what?

Brion: There are several computer programs that they use out at UCSD.

We forward what we call a state vector that allows you to program or to tell exactly where the vehicle is, the ISS, and then we correlate that to time and lat/longs where the orbit path crosses the Equator. From there, they can determine the time that the station will be over the target that they're intending to capture a picture of.

Erika: Okay.

Brion: So it's done by basically a computer program.

Erika: Okay. Well, we have some questions that, it appears that a lot of students are very interested and their teachers are either going to try to submit a proposal to be a part of EarthKAM and so Terry with Mrs. Smallwood's class, are we supposed to work in groups on the project like you do at NASA?

Brion: Most definitely.

That is probably the most important part of working at NASA, working EarthKAM and that's to be part of a team. You have your own responsibilities and you have to get those accomplished in order to make the whole system work. Yes, it's very important. Teamwork is number one.

Erika: Okay, well we're back to our 2nd graders. We've got Rachel. Rachel is very excited and interested to be with us today and she wants to know how big does the Earth look from space.

Brion: Big. It depends on how far away you are. From the shuttle, it actually looks very big. It fills the windows. You can see the horizon off to the side, but they're not far enough away to see the whole globe like they did on the Apollo missions.

Erika: That kind of tosses us off to another question and this is from Mary, 6th grader, and wants to know what types of features is the camera able to pick up. So we were talking about what does it look like. So what kind of features can that camera pick up?

Brion: We can actually, depending on which lens we're using, from the small to the large lens, you can see actual houses with the larger lens. We can see river deltas, coral reefs under the water, hill tops, differences in the sizes of lakes if we compare it from a previous picture to a new picture, from one season to the next. There's a multitude of different geographic features that we can actually see to compare to one another or to determine deforestation, burning, silt and run off in river deltas. So there's lots of stuff.

Erika: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, we might be able to pull up some pictures in just a little bit to see what some of the pictures look exactly like they are coming from EarthKAM and in a little while, with a little bit of magic, we might be able to do that.

Now Sandy in Mrs. Smallwood's class, this is a 7th-grade class, wants to know does EarthKAM take pictures also from hurricanes, tornadoes and other weather-related things?

Brion: We try not to take pictures of clouds. We ask the students to check weather maps, global weather maps, but at the same time, if there's an occurrence that's happening at that time, yes, we encourage students to take pictures of them. Especially like hurricanes where you have this big mass and you can actually see or try to target the eye of the hurricane.

Erika: As an engineer, we already know that you have to really be strong in math usually, and so Todd wants to write in and wants to find out what kind of math and science fields do you use most on your job?

Brion: Just general math. Algebra is most of it. Most of the calculations that we do, we have, we've done the thought process, it's involved and it's incorporated into the computer program, so it's more programming. You have to understand the data that you're trying to achieve, the data that has to go into the program in order to get out the good data from the programs itself. So basically good solid math skills, and it's more a critical thinking type of skill that's developed through learning math that's perhaps more important than the actual math skills themselves.

Erika: From Mike who is a 6th grader is writing in and wants to know what was your favorite subject at school? A lot of them are interested in you, Brion. They want to find out more about you.

Brion: My favorite subject, well obviously I'm, I guess kind of a jock so it was PE, yeah, normal class. Outside of that, science, I was just naturally inclined to do well in the science classes. In high school my all-time favorite class was biology. I had a real good time in there.

Erika: Well we have Lamarr is a 7th grader and this is Lamarr's second question. What types of investigations have been done and are currently being done by different classrooms that are involved and who provides the research topic?

Brion: The students actually pick and get their project coordinated by a NASA Research Center. It's a student-driven project. They're the ones who actually conduct the investigation. They have their thesis or the hypothesis that they try to prove and they evaluate, and we give them some very rudimentary interpretation skills on how to determine what colors mean what, the different features on the ground, and then we let them go from there. And they can also bounce their initial observations off of NASA experts, and we can kind of guide them into making sure that their results are actually correct to what they understood.

Erika: Okay, well another question coming in. Are there any support materials for the project once a class gets accepted and signs on?

Brion: All this is handled through UCSD. Yes. Any materials that they will need outside of the normal classroom computers and paper and stuff like that, will be supported through the University of California at San Diego. We actually have an EarthKAM, the mission operations center there has undergraduate students that work even beyond when we're active in the International Space Station window, to make sure that the students will have the materials that they need to conduct a successful investigation.

Erika: Okay. One of the interesting things that we use in Mission Control, we were talking about a job as a Mission Controller, but also just and generally at NASA when you're working with the space program and working with 16 different countries working together, you have to think about time. So Eric who's an 8th grader in New Orleans, this is our first New Orleans person, welcome aboard, wants to know what is GMT and what is the difference between GMT and CST.

Brion: GMT is Greenwich Mean Time. It's a standard that was established many, many years ago and it's a universal way to have everybody coordinated and operating at the same instant. CST is Central Standard Time and it's GMT minus 6 or +6. So we're six hours after Greenwich Mean Time. And that's the time that the station operates on. They operate on GMT. So you will see a day number, followed by the-,

that's the 056, followed by the hours :19, minutes :46, and the seconds which are :24, 25, 26 and so on.

So yes, we can get down straight to the instant if we have to handle things by time.

Erika: Well you know, the other day I got an opportunity to actually visit with Brion, before you guys got a chance to ask him questions live, and we actually went down here, we're in a building where we train the astronauts. And we actually have a mock-up or a life-sized model of the window that the astronauts peer out of. So I was hoping that maybe Brion could talk to us a little bit about that window. And what that window is all about and how we use the window.

Brion: I really hesitate to call it a window. That's what it's referred to as. It's a very, very flat lens system. There's actually four pieces of glass incorporated into the lab window. There's an outer protective pane, the secondary and the primary pressure pane. These are what keep the air in the station, and then there's an internal scratch pane that protects the primary and the secondary pressure panes.

Now they are made so that they transmit like 99% of the light in certain parts of the spectrum through them. So when we put a science instrument in this U.S. lab window, it's able to see very, very clearly and with a minimum of distortion the targets that we're looking for on the ground.

Erika: We have a student in a 4th grade class, Mrs. Peterson's class that wants to know how long did it take to actually build the EarthKAM?

Close up of Brion

Brion: The EarthKAM was put together over a course of about two years. Dr. Ride, with her being an astronaut, had knowledge of certain components that were used by the crew on the shuttle. So what she did was say, "If I can take this camera, the laptop, we develop the EarthKAM software, and then we hook to the Orbital Communications Adapter System on a shuttle, and now on the station, we can command pictures and get them down to the ground." And this is the proposal that she took to NASA headquarters that was approved as KidSat and turned into EarthKAM.

Erika: That's very cool.

Brion: Yes.

Erika: Absolutely very cool. So how many years has EarthKAM been around and how many missions has it flown? This is coming from Amber.

Brion: Oh, the actual number of years, I think we've been going now for about six or seven years. We've flown several missions. I think it was six shuttle missions

and now we're up to the op cycle five, and we're going up to op cycle six in the beginning of March.

Erika: Now what does that mean?

Brion: That's operation cycle. It's just a term that I use to refer to each individual session that we set up in the window.

Erika: Oh, okay. Well Kelly wants to know first of all will it be on the ISS, and I think the answer

Brion: Most definitely.

Erika: All right. So and where-, will it always be in the same place on International Space Station if there is any, or?

Brion: We've been set up, we primarily like to set up in the U.S. lab, in the lab window because of hardware constraints and other factors involved, the crew time and other factors. We've also been set up in the service module, in two separate windows in the service module. So as long as the window is what we call nadir-facing, it looks straight down at the Earth, then we can set up and operate.

Erika: Okay. We have a student that's a 7th grader and he wants to know if there is a way, if your class is not picked, to be a part of the EarthKAM project. Is there still a way to use EarthKAM?

Brion: Oh yes, yes. Again the images are available on the Web site and as a matter of fact here locally, Seabrook Middle School

has just put together and has had the school board accept a complete class on EarthKAM. So whether or not we're operating on the ISS, the students there can take this semester-long class to use the images, to carry out different investigations on different parts of the Earth, comparing and contrasting things that they're able to see through our images.

Erika: I want to thank all the students that are joining us today. You guys are having absolutely wonderful questions. We still have about six minutes worth of time to answer your questions, so if you haven't found out yet, you can send in the questions to Questteam@hotmail.com. That's q-u-e-s-t-t-e-a-m@hotmail.com.

I also want to say thank you to the students, our student reports at Jake Yates Communications High School here in Houston. We apologize, they did some wonderful packages for us. We do have a series of Webcasts that are all the way through next Monday, and so we hope to get those packages to you in one of our other programs starting tomorrow at 1:00 o'clock, and so we'll try to work on that, but we want to say thanks to the students out there for all your hard work and due to technical difficulties, we couldn't get those packages up today about the International Space Station whether from fiction to fact and also what you in the community think an engineer does. So that's pretty cool.

Brion: Great.

Erika: Absolutely. Well I always have a question for our special guest and that is what would you, what kind of motivation or what kind of advice do you have for students that are interested in becoming an engineer?

Brion: Discipline. You have to learn discipline, regardless of how hard the studies are, whichever class or whichever discipline of engineering or science that you'd like to go into, you have to apply yourself. If you do that, you learn how to do that well, especially when you're young,

as you get to more detailed subjects in college and so forth, it becomes much easier for you to do.

So just do whatever you like but do it well, and do it to the best of your ability and don't hesitate to ask for help. That always helps, especially if you don't understand something, get the help that you need to understand it, so that you don't get caught behind.

Erika: We have a question from a 2nd grader and this is really a good question and I'm really amazed because it makes a lot of sense. And Sara in Mrs. Crawford's class wants to know, what do they carry with them in space, and we mean the astronauts. And the other day when we were looking at the portal that you were showing me, the window area, we were also looking at some storage racks and things like that.

Brion: Yes.

Erika: And so what do they bring with them? I'd say everything.

Brion: Everything. There's a whole office of people here at Johnson Space Center that are dedicated to determining what the crew is going to need to accomplish the science and the systems tasks while they're on board.

And also what they might need in case of an emergency, and then what they need to do their-, to carry out their daily functions for eating and sleeping and drinks. And the coordinate with the crews to make sure that they get drinks and other stuff, a menu to their liking.

So, yes, it takes a lot of people to put together and determine what the crew is going to need for their stay on board the station.

Erika: One of the questions that the students are sending in or wanting to know is, and this is Haley, she wants to know how long does it take an astronaut to get used to walking once they get back from space? And that's a good question. It has to do with how long they stay up there, a lot.

Brion: That's most of it. The increment crews when they come back, as they land on the shuttle, they usually have about 45 minutes to an hour as they get out of the landing suit on the shuttle. They go through a medical checkout real quick and they also can stand up and get acclimated very quickly to gravity.

And it depends. It's an individual thing. Some individuals are affected more by the gravity than others. But it's a rather short period of time considering they've been in zero G or microgravity for about the past four or five months.

Erika: Well we want to thank you guys for your questions today. Thank you so much. We want to thank Brion Au for kicking off our celebration of National Engineer's Week. Thank you so much. Now you know more about EarthKAM and make sure that you log onto the Web site to see all the really cool images from space. And it's students just like you that are logging on and actually taking those pictures. So that's pretty cool.

Thank you very much Brion for being with us today.

Brion: Thank you very much for asking me.

Erika: Absolutely. Well guess what guys? It's now time to take another look at Station Trivia.

What is the name of the U.S. laboratory on space? Now you guys, before we give you the answer to that, you've got to remember that the U.S. laboratory was recently attached to the International Space Station and it's-, I'm not going to give you any more information on that. But I can tell you that it's one of six expected laboratories that we plan on having on the International Space Station.

The Japanese will also be putting a module on Space Station and also the Russians for a laboratory. So we hopefully will have a whole International Space Station by the year 2006 with several laboratories and several countries working together to make this happen. So with that, we're going to say what is the name of the U.S. laboratory on Space Station. And did you get it?

Let's see what the answer is. The answer is Destiny. The Destiny Laboratory. Yay to everybody that got it. All right, well we're back here with Ross. Ross, thank you so much for joining us for the cool experiment of the day.

Ross: You're welcome.

Erika: Absolutely. Well we're about out of time, but I had one last question for Ross. And I wanted to know, Ross, what do you get when you mix rock music with a documentary?

Ross: A rockumentary.

Erika: A rockumentary, that's absolutely right, a rockumentary. And as a matter of fact, we have a very cool rockumentary. It's called the International Space Station Rockumentary. So we plan on leaving you with that today. Thank you very much for your questions and for everything that you sent in today and just for joining us. Have a great day and we'll see you again on Station Update. Thanks a lot.