Astronauts aboard the International Space Station to answer questions from NC students

On Monday morning, July 12, NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough will be answering questions from North Carolina schoolkids from 250 miles above Earth in the International Space Station (ISS). The downlink event, organized by the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, was years in the making and will be broadcast live on NASA TV.

A small group of students from Morehead's Summer Science Camp will gather under the planetarium dome for a space-station-themed show and the downlink event where 15-20 questions will be answered in real time. The station will on the other side of the planet, pasing over Asia, across the Pacific and just North of Hawaii during the event.

Putting on an event like this is no small feat and turnaround time was very quick.

"Morehead applied to be a host site for an ISS downlink event in late 2019. We were contacted about this opportunity in early June" according to Jonathan Frederick, who helps coordinate programs at the planetarium and also serves as Director of the North Carolina Science Festival.

McArthur, who earned a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from UCLA and a Ph.D. in Oceanography from the University of California, San Diego, has previously flown as a mission specialist on STS-125, the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. She also studied underwater acoustics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Kimbrough earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from the United States Military Academy and Master of Science degree in Operations Research from Georgia Tech. He served as ISS commander in 2016 during Expedition 49/50 and previously served as Robotics Branch Chief for NASA's Astronaut Office.

Both astronauts have been aboard the ISS since April when they arrived via a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.

Morehead has a long history of contributions to NASA and astronaut training. Planetarium Director Tony Jenzano and his team modified a surplus World War II flight trainer and a barber's chair to create a mockup of the Gemini capsule to train astronauts in celestial navigation under the planetarium dome.

Jenzano would later state “Carolina is the only university in the country, in fact the world, that can claim all the astronauts as alumni.” Between 1960 and 1975, nearly every astronaut who participated in the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz programs trained at Morehead. Several of these astronauts would go on to serve the Space Shuttle program.

Early astronaut training housed in Chapel Hill