School children in Kent speak to astronaut aboard International Space Station

School children from Kent had the chance to speak to an astronaut aboard the International Space Station today, as it passed overhead.

Pupils from six schools came together to ask questions via radio link-up from St.Peters-In-Thanet Church of England Junior School, in Broadstairs.

Just a handful of schools get the chance each year in the UK.

The pupils had 11 minutes to ask astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli some questions.

• One pupil asked if it's hot or cold in space

One pupil, Harper, asked: "Is it hot or cold in space? And if it's hot, how do you keep cool? And if it's cold, how do you keep warm in your space suit? Over."

Ms Moghbeli replied from space: "Harper, that's a great question. It is hot when we're facing the sun and it is very cold when we're blocked from the sun.

"In our space suits we are the only source of heat, our human body. So it's very important we don't get too cold. The only other thing we have is some fingertip heaters on our gloves and for cooling we have water that runs through a suit that we wear to help cool us down. Over."

This event is possible because of Hilderstone, a local amateur radio club.

Matt Payne, Hilderstone Radio Society, said: "We recently spoke to an astronaut via a video link at NASA and he gave us some fantastic advice which was don't aspire to be an astronaut, aspire to do the thing that you love and really develop a passion for something because you can be trained to be an astronaut but you can't be trained to have a passion for engineering, or botany or chemistry or geology that's got to come from someone themselves. So have a passion for that subject and then you could potentially end up working in space."

Teacher, Nathan Williams, said the day was about "inspiring the children".

He said: "We want those children to see that that could be them in the future, they could be the next astronauts. But not only the astronauts, there's so many things that go into getting somebody into space.

"So radio engineers, all sorts of people and we want our children to realise that actually they can be someone like that."

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