First Chinese school lesson broadcast from space

A student watches Wang Yaping's lesson from space on an iPad. (Image: Reuters)

China’s Shenzhou-10 mission to the Tiangong 1 space lab successfully blasted off from Inner Mongolia last week, reaching the orbiting space lab two days later. Aboard the Shenzhou-10 were three astronauts, including China’s second female astronaut, making the country's fifth manned mission. They are expected to remain on the space platform until June 25 or 26.

The three astronauts are testing rendezvous and docking technology, using the Tiangong-1 as precursor to a more permanent settlement in the stars. China hopes to launch the permanent settlement in the coming years. The female astronaut, Wang Yaping, along with her regular duties, was also responsible for conducting the first Chinese school lesson in space, which took place Thursday and was beamed directly from the space lab to children on the ground.

According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, around 330 primary and secondary school students were able to interact with Wang via a special Beijing classroom, in which they were able to ask her direct questions upon the conclusion of her lesson, with some 60 million more seeing the lesson live.

In her class, Wang demonstrated numerous lessons on weight and mass in space, showing how regular scales cannot be used in the station’s microgravity, and instead a special scale that employs Newton’s Second Law of Motion is used.

To show how objects move under microgravity, Wang asked her fellow astronauts to rotate her, first to 90 degrees and then to 180. Similar motion experiments included the use of a spinning top to demonstrate gyroscopic motion in space as well as the use of a pendulum.

As her last demonstration, Wang created a ring of water using a metal ring, saying that the increased surface tension in space allowed this, going on to turn the water ring into a water ball as she poured water into it, which was met by applause from the students.

In a question-and-answer session, Wang was asked what the view was like from space, to which she replied, "The stars we see are much brighter, but they do not twinkle. The sky we see isn't blue, but black. And every day, we can see the sun rise 16 times because we circle the Earth every 90 minutes."