Teachers will have an opportunity to talk this Thursday
afternoon with the current residents of the Earth-orbiting
International Space Station.

Approximately 25 NASA Explorer School (NES) teachers from
several states visiting NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, Md., will ask questions beginning at approximately
1:15 p.m. EDT to Commander Gennady Padalka and Flight
Engineer Mike Fincke, who are now past the halfway point of
their six-month Expedition 9 mission.

Questions will include living and working in space and future
space exploration. Teachers in Houston and California will
also have the opportunity to monitor the discussion while
attending education workshops at NASA’s Johnson Space Center,
Houston, Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The downlink is an integral component of NASA’s Teaching from
Space Program, which promotes educational opportunities that
use the unique environment of human spaceflight. The program
builds partnerships with the education community to create
unique learning opportunities through the use of NASA
research and educational technology.

Viewers who live in the continental United States can see the
program on NASA Television on AMC-6, at 72 degrees west
longitude, Transponder 9, 3880 MHz, vertical polarization,
audio at 6.8 MHz. Viewers in Alaska or Hawaii can see the
program on AMC-7, at 137 degrees west longitude, Transponder
18, at 4060 MHz, vertical polarization, audio at 6.8 MHz.

NES establishes a three-year partnership between NASA and 50
school teams, consisting of teachers and education
administrators from diverse communities nationwide. While
partnered with NASA, NES teams will acquire throughout the
school year new teaching resources and technology tools using
NASA’s unique content, experts and other resources to make
learning science, mathematics and technology more exciting to
students.

For information about NASA’s education programs on the
Internet, visit:

http://education.nasa.gov/

For information about NASA’s Teaching from Space Program on
the Internet, visit:

http://education.jsc.nasa.gov/educators/tfsp.htm