Norwalk Youths Interact With Shuttle Crew

Four teen-agers from Lakeside Junior High School in Norwalk became the first students to attempt television communication with the space shuttle last week.

With the help of local ham radio enthusiasts, the students recorded two experiments on video, broadcast them into space via a television transmitter and then discussed them live on ham radio with Cmdr. Richard Richards.

To send the video into space, ham operators first transmitted it from the school to the Long Beach home of ham operator Jim Steffen. Then Steffen relayed the signal to the shuttle, using equipment he had assembled in his home.

The video transmission is the latest product of an ongoing project called the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment, supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Federal Communications Commission.

The 13- and 14-year-olds broadcast two experiments for the astronauts. Both demonstrated how energy is transferred from one object to another.

In one experiment, students flicked a penny into a line of coins to show how the last coin in the row would then fly off. Students performed a similar experiment with a line of metal balls suspended by a string.