Cosmonauts on space station to turn teacher for Russian students

Russian cosmonauts on board the International Space Station will turn schoolteacher, conducting a lesson from space for Russian students, officials said. The event will broadcast the cosmonauts live to students nationwide on April 11, an Education Ministry official told RIA Novosti Wednesday. April 11 is the day before the 53rd anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic first manned spaceflight, which saw the cosmonaut and his Vostok spacecraft complete an orbit of the Earth in 1961. In October, a teleconference was held with cosmonauts working on the station to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first woman to go into space, Valentina Tereshkova. NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins and Rick Mastracchio and Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata conducted their own student-oriented activity last week, talking with college and high school students gathered at California State University in Los Angeles as part of NASA's Destination Station awareness campaign.