The ISS Progress 37 cargo carrier launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday at 12:15 p.m. EDT.

Scheduled to dock at the International Space Station Saturday, the unmanned Progress spaceship is loaded with 2.6 tons of food, fuel, oxygen, propellant and supplies for the Expedition 23 crew.

The Progress is similar in appearance and some design elements to the Soyuz spacecraft, which brings crew members to the station, serves as a lifeboat while they are there and returns them to Earth. The aft module, the instrumentation and propulsion module, is nearly identical.

NASA has delayed the last flight of the space shuttle Endeavour from July to November at the earliest to allow time to modify its cargo - a $1.5 billion science experiment - for a longer stay on the International Space Station.

Endeavour was initially targeted for a July 29 launch with a crew of six astronauts in order to deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the space station.

The spectrometer will be installed on the exterior of the space station to study high-energy cosmic rays in the hunt for elusive antimatter and dark matter.

More than 200 researchers from 16 countries are working to build the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. The project is led by Nobel laureate physicist Samuel Ting of MIT.

Topics in this report:
1. Upcoming School Contacts
2. Caldwell-Dyson Speaks with Houston School via ARISS
3. ARISS International Team Meeting Held
4. Astronaut Training Status

1. Upcoming School Contacts
An Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) contact has been scheduled for an IARU (International Amateur Radio Union) Region 1 Exhibition in European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium on Tuesday, April 27 at 12:53 UTC via telebridge station LU1CGB in Argentina. Students from European School Brussels II have been invited to visit the European Parliament for this special event.

An ARISS (Amateur Radio on the International Space Station) voice contact is scheduled for Saturday 8th May 2010 at 17:01 UTC (around 3:00am Sunday morning local QLD time) as the ISS passes over Australia.
The scheduled telebridge contact with ISS will be with the Smithsonian Institute, National Air and Space Museum, Washington DC, USA. The ARISS ground station will be VK4KHZ located in Glenden Queensland.
Downlink signal will be the usual 145.800FM and should be audible over a large part of the east coast of Australia.
The contact should also be broadcast live on echolink (AMSAT Server).

Space shuttle Atlantis held the spotlight late on Wednesday night into early Thursday morning as it rolled out of Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) in Florida, on its way to the launch pad for what is planned to be its last flight.

The black-and-white winged-orbiter, mounted to an orange external fuel tank and twin white solid rocket boosters, left the voluminous building â€" the largest one-story building in the world â€" just before midnight atop a mobile launcher platform and crawler transporter tracked vehicle.

Atlantis' trip to the launch pad came just a day after the successful landing of its sister ship Discovery on Tuesday to wrap up a 15-day flight to the International Space Station.

NASA's Human Research Program and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, or NSBRI, of Houston will fund 11 proposals to help investigate questions about astronaut health and performance on future space exploration missions. The selected proposals, representing 10 institutions in eight states, will receive a total of almost $10 million over a three- to four-year period.

The Human Research Program provides knowledge and technologies to improve human health and performance during space exploration. The program also develops possible countermeasures for problems experienced during space travel.

NASA's recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is returning early images that confirm an unprecedented new capability for scientists to better understand our sun's dynamic processes. These solar activities affect everything on Earth.

Some of the images from the spacecraft show never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the sun's surface. The spacecraft also has made the first high-resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths.

"These initial images show a dynamic sun that I had never seen in more than 40 years of solar research," said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "SDO will change our understanding of the sun and its processes, which affect our lives and society. This mission will have a huge impact on science, similar to the impact of the Hubble Space Telescope on modern astrophysics."

As the Hubble Space Telescope achieves the major milestone of two decades on orbit, NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute, or STScI, in Baltimore are celebrating Hubble's journey of exploration with a stunning new picture and several online educational activities. There are also opportunities for people to explore galaxies as armchair scientists and send personal greetings to Hubble for posterity.

NASA is releasing a new Hubble photo of a small portion of one of the largest known star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. Three light-year-tall towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula. The scene is reminiscent of Hubble's classic "Pillars of Creation" photo from 1995, but even more striking.

Dayton Hamvention 2010 will be held at the Hara Arena Complex in Dayton, Ohio on May 14 - 16. The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) and the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation (AMSAT) will both man exhibit booths at the event. Gould Smith, WA4SXM, AMSAT Project Manager for ARISSat-1, plans to give a presentation at the AMSAT Forum titled, "Getting ARISSat-1 Ready to Fly." The Dayton Hamvention is an internationally attended amateur radio convention that draws crowds of 25,000 annually. For more information on Dayton Hamvention 2010, go to: http://www.hamvention.org/

http://www.amsat.org/

The unmanned ISS Progress 35 supply ship undocked from the Pirs docking compartment Thursday. Filled with trash and station discarded items, the Progress will be used for scientific experiments until it is deorbited and burned up in the Earth's atmosphere next week.

ISS Progress 35 arrived at the station Oct. 17 after launching Oct. 14 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Its departure clears the way for the ISS Progress 37 cargo ship that is scheduled to launch to the station April 28. ISS Progress 37 will bring to the station 1,918 pounds of propellant, 110 pounds of oxygen and air, 220 pounds of water and 3,031 pounds of spare parts and experiment hardware.