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got their timelines. Maybe they turned their fax machines off. Toward the end of the mission, we found out that the Mission Operations people in California had someone whose responsibility was to call the schools, but we never were in contact with that person. We knew from UCSD that the targeting was accurate, but, aside from two short e-mails that Mr. Kassebaum told me he received, I don't know if the schools were happy with the images. Maybe it was not really important that the Data System team was aware of the kids' level of satisfaction. 

Another suggestion I have is to rewrite the procedures for file logging and transferring, and for faxing. We made a lot of revisions ourselves. We never looked at the ESC team's steps, so that really doesn't need to be in our procedures. I don't think they were really concerned with ours, either. Mike asked Ron to stop giving us the CCFs, since we didn't need them for anything. We only had bits and pieces of the paths to FTP the images to, and we didn't have the IP or username or password in our procedure. When the network crashed, it took KidSat a while to set the FTP back up again. I think it's important for us to have details like these in case of an emergency.
 
I would like to end my summary on a positive note. I feel very fortunate to have met Skip Reymann (Flight Team, JPL engineer). He had nothing but good to say about the students he met through his involvement with KidSat. He told one of the reporters that this mission was the most satisfying one he had ever worked on. I have a lot of respect for him and I place a lot of value on his opinion. I personally think it speaks very well of KidSat that he said that. 

I have really enjoyed working with KidSat, and I want to thank everyone who helped the program. I really think this is special. I hope every kid has the opportunity to learn from space with KidSat. I know it will be hard since I'm going to college next year, but I hope to stay involved with KidSat in the future. KidSat has been good to me (and for me), and I think it can be so much more for the kids it was designed to teach.
 
8.1.7 A day in the Life of the Gateway
Dan Barstow, Teacher Education Resource Center, KidSat CCDT

I am now at the UCSD Gateway. The undergraduate students here are very focused on their work. They're getting ready for the second session with the KidSat camera. It's almost like the quiet focus of a golf tournament. In the Gateway room, the students are at their stations, each concentrating on his or her screen, getting the latest data from the shuttle, communicating status reports, asking questions of other stations-this is the real thing, now. It's especially impressive knowing that six months ago this room was empty, and that all of this was designed and built by these students--and it's working. In another room, students are communicating with schools, receiving image requests, cross-checking the METs, locations and environmental data, and preparing the request files to be sent to the shuttle. And in a third room, there is an exact duplicate of the KidSat camera and Thinkpad, with the same image request files. When this camera clicks, the camera on the shuttle should be clicking. 

Now the daylight part of the orbit is done. We wait anxiously for the downlink from the shuttle. We know the pre-Mir session worked, now let's hope this does. The file is received at JSC, then at UCSD and JPL. A seemingly endless format conversion takes place, and then the image appears. It looks like clouds, and there's not much land to confirm the location (to recalibrate the METs if necessary). Sally comes in. Can we at least figure out of this is the 180 mm lens? We can't tell for sure, but the cloud patterns do look larger, so we guess (until we can confirm with a land image) that it is the 180 mm.  

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