Several Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools students got to participate in an extremely long-distance call on Wednesday, as they asked questions of astronauts orbiting the earth.
As the International Space Station passed over South Sudan, hundreds of Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools students from all grade levels sat in the Chapel Hill High auditorium to watch the live broadcast. The streamed video from around 250 miles above Earth’s surface featured NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and European Space Agency astronaut Andreas Mogensen answering questions taped by CHCCS students and transmitted to the spacecraft.
Over the course of 20 minutes, Rubio and Mogensen responded to requests to describe what being in space is like, what they do for work on the ISS, and what they do for fun. That included a demonstration of how they eat – like catching M&Ms in zero gravity.
NASA’s Frank Rubio (left) and ESA’s Andreas Mogensen respond to CHCCS students’ questions during a live broadcast from the International Space Station on September 13, 2023.
Mike Woods is the curriculum and instructional management coordinator at CHCCS. He helped coordinate the district’s participating in the broadcast, which took several months to enter and then gather students’ responses for.
“NASA sends out an application process – it is a competitive [one],” said Woods. “We were one of the few selected based on things we included, such as a focus on STEM… particularly in our CTE department, but really across the district.”
The call was part of a morning-long event held by CHCCS to celebrate and uplift careers in STEM – or science, technology, engineering and math. Before the NASA Downlink, students gathered outside under tents set up with booths of different classes in the district’s CTE program and other nearby employers whose industries rely on STEM.
CHCCS students explore different booths at a career fair focused on industries involving STEM.
Woods said the specific students chosen to send in questions to NASA for the astronauts’ call were picked in part based on their own connections to STEM subjects.
“There were competitions within schools,” he described. “There were certain grade levels included – maybe it was based on something that they’re studying, like Earth and space, [things] of that nature.”
As part of the lead-up to the call, the students in attendance also got to hear from a more local example of success in STEM. Pristine Onuoha, who graduated from East Chapel Hill High School this past summer, spoke about her research done during high school which earned national recognition. Onuoha won the “Genes in Space” competition in 2022, submitting a project on studying how and why telomeres in strands of DNA lengthen in space and beating more than 1,000 other applicants. She saw her project blast off up to the ISS in June and is being completed up with the astronauts in orbit.
Pristine Onuoha accepts her trophy as the winning project submission to the 2022 Genes in Space contest. (Photo via Genes in Space.)
Onuoha – who is now a biochemistry major at UNC – said she began becoming interested in science by doing water ecology and being driven to find answers to specific questions. She said she hoped the CHCCS students might have felt the same way hearing from live astronauts.
“I think it helped them feel more seen in science,” Onuoha said of the broadcast, “because they got to ask the questions, and those questions got answered. That’s something that really motivates students to dive deeper into science and imagine themselves in place of the astronauts.”
With Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools working to inform students that STEM classes, resources, and jobs are available to everyone, Woods said he hopes the call will help inspire the students to be anything they want to be. Onuoha echoed that, saying a key way to follow dreams is keeping up the excitement they showed on Wednesday during the astronauts’ broadcast.
“So, to anyone curious about how to get more involved in science,” she said, “I’d just say pursue any opportunity around you to do so. You never know what you might really like, so just take any opportunity you can.”
To watch the full broadcast of NASA’s Frank Rubio and the ESA’s Andreas Mogensen answering CHCCS students’ questions, click here.
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