NASA To Host First ISS Google+ Hangout On February 22

In what will be the first-ever Google+ Hangout to beam to the ISS, NASA will be hosting such an event on February 22, where astronauts Kevin Ford, Tom Marshburn, and Chris Hadfield will be answering your questions from 11 am ET to noon ET. The team will answer questions that are both pre-recorded, as well as live questions from social media sites.

The pre-recorded questions will come from users who submit video questions through YouTube. Users will have until February 12 to upload a YouTube video that's 30 seconds long at most, and it must be tagged with #askAstro. The same goes for questions on Twitter and Google+, while a separate Facebook page will be available on February 22.

The Hangout will be available on NASA's official Google+ page, so be sure to bookmark it for February 22 at 11 am ET. It's not said how long the Hangout will last, but based on past Hangouts with officials and such, it'll probably be around one hour to two hours, which should allow for plenty of questions that I'm sure space nuts are excited to hear the answers to.

In the past, Google+ Hangouts have been a popular tool for communicating with government officials, including President Obama and Vice President Biden, both of which hosted Google+ Hangouts in the past to answer questions from citizens. As time goes on, we should see Hangouts become a more popular platform for such uses, and maybe even become the standard for Q&A sessions with various celebrities.