The International Space Station with ESA’s Columbus laboratory flies 400 km high at speeds that defy gravity – literally. At 28 800 km/h it only takes 90 minutes for the weightless laboratory to make a complete circuit of Earth. Astronauts working and living on the Station experience 16 sunrises and sunsets each day.
Posted on Wednesday October 23rd, 2024 by Nadjejda
On this day in 2001, former ESA astronaut Claudie Haigneré became the first European woman to visit the International Space Station.
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Posted on Wednesday August 7th, 2024 by Marie Deschamps
NASA astronauts Tracy Dyson and Jeanette Epps operated from space a team of robots on Earth in the third session of the Surface Avatar experiment, a collaboration between ESA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The robot team, consisting of ESA’s Interact rover, and DLR’s Rollin’ Justin and robot dog Bert, worked in a simulated […]
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Posted on Wednesday July 31st, 2024 by Nadjejda
Space missions come with a unique set of challenges – while these are hurdles that every astronaut must overcome, space agencies had not, up to this day, interrogated their impact on an astronaut with a physical disability.
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Posted on Friday May 17th, 2024 by Marie Deschamps
This summer marks the ten-year anniversary of the electromagnetic levitation facility on the International Space Station. Helping to reveal the core physics at play in materials science, the Electromagnetic Levitator (EML) is a furnace in ESA’s Columbus laboratory that can melt metals by induction heating them up to 2200 °C. Scientists can then observe the samples […]
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Posted on Wednesday August 16th, 2023 by Nadjejda
The European Robotic Arm (ERA) completed its first two years in space with the successful installation of a radiator and an airlock for the International Space Station.
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Posted on Wednesday July 19th, 2023 by Nadjejda
Every week spent in a different place, in a different time zone. A myriad of training lessons, countless instructors, and never-before-seen technology. A life between airports, the new faces, the non-stop learning… and no time for lunch.
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Posted on Wednesday August 10th, 2022 by Marco Trovatello — 1 min read
The International Space Station Multilateral Coordination Board met Friday, July 29, to discuss the status of the combined work aboard the microgravity laboratory.
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Posted on Thursday May 5th, 2022 by Nadjejda
It was time to wake up. Slowly but surely, one of the elbows of the robot stretched out in its new space home. The move had been rehearsed many times on the ground, but this was a first for the 11-metre-long robotic spacewalker.
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