NORTHERN STUDENTS TO LINK WITH CANADIAN ASTRONAUT ON SPACE SHUTTLE

Released on June 19, 2007

Students from four La Ronge schools will have a chance to learn from Saskatoon-born astronaut Dave Williams via a real-time video link on the next space shuttle mission.

The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and Saskatchewan Learning have arranged for up to 230 students to participate in the downlink, with eight having the opportunity to ask Williams questions about working in space. The students will be chosen based on questions recently submitted to the CSA by several classrooms in La Ronge and area. The students will get to pose their questions directly to Williams, and hear his answers from space.

Williams will fly on Mission STS-118, which is currently scheduled to launch on August 9, 2007, although the launch date is subject to change. The mission's main task will be to carry on construction on the International Space Station. Williams is slated to participate in three of the four spacewalks on the 14-day mission, a demanding task, but in between these assignments he will speak with students in La Ronge by videoconference.

"We are very excited that students from northern Saskatchewan will be able to speak to and learn from Dr. Williams, especially given his personal interest in teaching," Premier Lorne Calvert said. "One of the dividends of being a wired province is the ability to connect people across the nation and the globe, or in this case, beyond."

The real-time video link to northern Saskatchewan is made possible through the Saskatchewan Research Network (SRnet), which extended its research and education (R&E) network to La Ronge as part of a CANARIE project in November 2006. SRnet's network interconnects in Saskatoon with CANARIE's national R&E backbone, CA*net, to connect to the Canadian Space Agency in Montreal. A thousand times faster than high-speed internet, SRnet represents the highest broadband network in the most northerly location in Canada.

Williams has been in space once before and he believes that space is an excellent platform from which to teach science. To support this initiative, the CSA has developed materials that teachers can use in the classroom, aimed at Grades 5-12. For STS-118, the three units focused on the effects of weightlessness, the risk of decompression sickness (also called bends), and strategies for dealing with bacteria in the closed and confined working conditions of space. These materials can be used in follow-up classes in the next school year.

While in space, Williams - a medical doctor - will be conducting experiments on the difficulty in manipulating objects in near-zero gravity, or perceptual-motor deficits in space. Astronauts tend to experience a reduction in hand-eye co-ordination while in space, and these experiments, designed by Dr. Barry Fowler of York University, will try to figure out why.

For more information about Mission STS-118 and the Canadian Space Agency, visit www.espace.gc.ca.

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For more information, contact:

Julie Simard, Media Relations
Canadian Space Agency
Phone: 450-926-4370

Scott Boyes
Northern Affairs
La Ronge
Phone: 306-425-6669
Email: sboyes@sna.gov.sk.ca
Cell: 306-425-8869