With Tim Peake now on-board the International Space Station and, judging by his tweets, fully enjoying his first couple of weeks, ARISS in the UK continues with its planning for the first of the schools to make contact with Tim via the Amateur Radio station on the ISS.

As previously announced, the first school that will talk to Tim will be Sandringham School in St. Albans, Hertfordshire. We are pleased to announce that this contact will take place on Friday 8th January 2016 at 0847UTC as the ISS passes over the UK.

Unfortunately, due to the rearrangement of work tasks on the ISS following the EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity or spacewalk), this contact will probably not feature the HamVideo system as other experiments will be running in the Columbus module.  However, we will still be webcasting the contact from the school via the  ARISS Live Webcast facility so everyone can still log on to watch the contact.  We will be posting more details about the start time of the web stream next week.

In the meantime, ARISS wishes you all a very Happy New Year.