¡Thank you for coming to enjoy our latest activity! It's been a great expeirence to be able to share a contact with all of you and begin to brainstorm about the questions we will ask to an astronaut in 2024.
As promised, here you have the answers we received before the ISS went below the horizon.
[AOS, Adquisition of Signal]
[ISS] IK1SLD this NA1SS, have you loud and clear. How me? Over.
[ISS] OR4ISS is ready.
[ISS] You’re coming in a little broken. Can you say it again? Over.
At this moment, the ISS was calling the ground station. IK1SLD is the call sign for the ground station, meanwhile NA1SS and OR4ISS are call signs for the space station.
[EARTH] What is the daily routine of work and activities of an astronaut and how are they organized to perform scientific investigations?
[ISS] Mia, we’re scheduled down to 5-minute increments. We’re busy from about 7:30 in the morning and we have a meeting in 7:30 in the evening… And between those hours we’re scheduled as I said. Our prime task is to perform science and we usually have someone on the ground to … with the experiments… but we also have to live up here so we also have to maintain the space station, we have to clean it, we have to take care of one each other… if anyone is not feeling well or sick so because of that we also have to do other several other things throughout the day.
[EARTH] How is the weather in the space station? When you return to earth, do you have a different feeling in terms of climate and environmental seasons?
[ISS] Andrea, the weather is very controlled up here. We keep the humidity around 30-40% humidity. Temperature somewhere around 70ºF, about 21 or so ºC. So, it’s very controlled. When I return to Earth? You know, I will say we’ve been watching the weather up here and seeing the storms and things like that and from up here they… You know, I’ve seen a couple hurricanes and they look kind of beautiful, but I know down on the Earth they can be very destructive, so it’s a different perspective. Over.
[EARTH] What was the greatest sacrifice you have made to be able to be where you are now?
[ISS] Carolina, I think the greatest sacrifice has been to… my family, you know, I have two twin girls and a husband and I’m away from them for half a year to be here and also just throughout my time in the military leading up to coming to NASA to a lot of deployments where I was away from friends and family. Over.
[EARTH] Do you believe that life exists not only in the earth, elsewhere in the universe?
[ISS] Paola, I do believe life exists, you know, humans are incredibly special. Just the fact that we can create something like the International Space Station and travel… travel to space… but I do think that probably life of some form… you know up here I can see the universe is just so expansive and so vast and… to think that there’s nothing else living out there seems unimaginable to me. Over.
[EARTH] What are you most passionate about in your career as an astronaut, and what would you say to people who aspire to be one?
[ISS] Stephanie, I think something I’m really passionate about in my career is just the aspect of exploration and pushing boundaries every time we’ve done that and we continue to do that up here with our experiments on the International Space Station and as we venture back to the moon with Artemis. Every time we explore and push the boundaries, we learn more about our home planet, we discover technologies that end up helping us and I just think it’s a human nature to explore.
[EARTH] What has been the biggest mental or physical challenge you have experienced on the space station?
[ISS] Paula, I think the biggest mental or physical challenge… I’d probably say mental challenge… You know, when we’re scheduled as I said, they detail down to the five minutes and if I fall behind that math… I get, you know, very invested sometimes in the experiments we’re doing and the other day I was doing an experiment I really cared about and got behind schedule and we had to cancel it for the day and to me that’s really hard when I feel like I got behind on something and causes to not be able to do part of our mission. Over.
[EARTH] As a member of a space station, what has been the most shocking moment you have experienced in space so far? How has it affected you personally and professionally?
[ISS] Esteban, I think one of the most surprising moments was actually when I first got to the International Space Station. We’ve trained probably hundreds of hours, on the mockups on the ground, but it turns out when you look at something upside down or sideways it looks completely different and I first got up here and I didn’t even know where I was or which way I was going and that to me was really a lesson on just how important perspective can be and how much things can change with a different perspective. Over.
[EARTH] We often hear about scientific research being conducted at the International Space Station, but could you share a personal moment that made you appreciate the beauty and wonder of space while living on the station?
[ISS] Roberto, I think it sounds silly maybe but a moment for me that was very special was when I first got up here there were eleven of us on board and we were from five different countries and just getting together and having a meal and sharing this moment of being in space orbiting above the Earth… the views that we have… and sharing that with people from all over the world but it felt like we were just brothers and sisters.
[LOS, Loss Of Signal]
As you can see, we were able to receive 8 of the 15 questions scheduled for this contact.
We hope you had a good time, and that this activity made you think what to ask the astronaut in 2024.
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