 26 students from around the world got the opportunity to ask an astronaut on the International Space Station, or ISS, a question of their choosing. Eight of those students were from the Caribbean, while two were from our very own island. The event is part of the Hurricane Hunters pilot program. Its purpose is to encourage Caribbean schools students to learn more about hurricanes in an innovative way. The pilot program is designed by the disaster fighters, a regional communications platform meant to improve disaster preparedness and build resilience. All the children involved got the opportunity to learn about hurricane research and monitoring. An added benefit was getting that education from an astronaut's perspective. St. Joseph's convent, Dana Fontenall, awaits her turn to ask a question to NASA astronaut Josh Casada. Then the moment of truth. Dana from St. Lucia, do you study and measure climate change from space over? We take photography from the Coppola, like we were talking about, and we can see the effects of climate change from time to time, depending on where we're looking and what we're looking for. But primarily we have instruments that are mounted on the outside of the space station that are used to collect data on the planet itself, whether that be surface temperature or atmospheric content. And that helps us give information back to the researchers and the scientists to help us understand where we are, where we're headed, and what we can do about it. Over. For the transmission to space, Dana revealed where the idea for the question came from. I came up with that question because we had a previous talk with Hurricane Hunters and they spoke about climate change in relation to the Earth. And I was just wondering if there's any way to track climate change over the years through a extraterrestrial perspective. So that would be without being actually on the Earth, but being above the Earth, would you be able to observe, track or measure any detail that would indicate that climate change is happening here on Earth? Now, it was St. Mary's turn. Men and I are from St. Lucia. What are the impacts of space, hurricanes and desert effectors here on Earth? Over. These hurricanes are a little different than the hurricanes we're familiar with on Earth. You know, the hurricanes on Earth are based on water and rain and pressure differences and even the rotation of the Earth. The space hurricanes tend to come from energetic electrons that are coming from the sun and then they collide with oxygen and nitrogen in our atmosphere. And that's what makes those beautiful colors, the greens and the blues of the aurora. And that's actually some really, really neat quantum mechanics that makes that happen. And sometimes, very rarely, but sometimes the magnetic field of the Earth is such that it actually makes a swirl of that aurora and makes it look like a hurricane. But the good news is that there's no threat there. It does sometimes maybe affect our satellites a little bit, but I haven't seen space hurricane yet, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed for sure. Over. In St. Lucia, the event was facilitated by the World Bank and the Disaster Vulnerability Reduction Project, or DVRP. I think I was nervous during because my leg was shaking and my fingers trying to calm myself down. But while asking the actual question, I didn't feel really nervous. I just felt comfortable and it was an amazing opportunity to actually get the astronaut there because I know it was a very short period of time, nine minutes where he was able to get transmission to answer our questions. And I'm lucky that I was an earlier person on the list that he was actually able to answer my question. So I just feel like it's an amazing opportunity. And now I can say I spoke to an astronaut who was actually in space. I also learned several other things based on the different questions persons asked from the way the space station measures, whether to the different forms of instruments they use to actually discover and communicate with different things and check out other planets as well. The ISS is a multinational collaborative project involving five participating agencies from around the world. Part of the ISS' mission is to examine the possibilities of living in space for months at a time while still orbiting relatively close to the Earth. All who received such a prestigious opportunity should be proud. This is Jack Hingson Compton from the Disaster Vulnerability Reduction Project.