Urban spaceman: ESA astronaut talks to Leicester schoolchildren

On Tuesday, the National Space Centre in Leicester was one of four European institutions which linked up with the International Space Station, where Dutch astronaut Andre Kuipers answered questions from schoolchildren.

Dr Becca Wilson and Dr Neil Humpage (both from our Earth Observation Science group) and undergraduate physics ambassador Lilian Garratt-Smithson assisted in the European Space Agency's PromISSe mission education activity, which also incorporated science centres in Germany, the Netherlands and Spain.

Hundreds of students from local schools, aged 10–16 years performed table top experiments to discover how convection and foams differ on Earth compared to the same investigations performed by Kuipers in the weightless environment of the ISS. A lucky few of the children were able to ask questions directly to Kuipers, via an ESA video link, about life on the ISS and the experiments current astronauts are performing.

The half-hour video-link-up can be viewed online.