Elizabeth Howell is the senior writer at Universe Today. She also works for Space.com, Space Exploration Network, the NASA Lunar Science Institute, NASA Astrobiology Magazine and LiveScience, among others. Career highlights include watching three shuttle launches, and going on a two-week simulated Mars expedition in rural Utah. You can follow her on Twitter @howellspace or contact her at her website.
Artist's impression of how huge cosmic structures deflect photons in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration
Leftover radiation from the Big Bang — that expansion that kick-started the universe — can be bent by huge cosmic structures, just like other light that we see in the universe. While the finding seems esoteric at first glance, scientists say the discovery could pave the way for finding a similar kind of signal that indicate the presence of gravitational waves in the moments after the universe was born.
That light is called the cosmic microwave background and is the radiation that was visible when the universe became transparent to radiation, 380,000 years after the Big Bang. A tiny bit of the CMB is polarized. There are two types of polarized light in the CMB: E-modes (first detected in 2002) and B-modes (which were just detected using a telescope in Antarctica and ESA’s Herschel space observatory.
“[B-modes] can arise in two ways,” the European Space Agency wrote in a press release.
“The first involves adding a twist to the light as it crosses the Universe and is deflected by galaxies and dark matter – a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. The second has its roots buried deep in the mechanics of a very rapid phase of enormous expansion of the Universe, which cosmologists believe happened just a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang – ‘inflation’.”
More results are on the way from ESA’s Planck telescope in 2014, at which point scientists hope to see this B-mode of the second type. For now, check out the full study in Physical Review Letters. There is also a preprint version available on Arxiv.
The MAVEN missions ‘Going to Mars’ campaign invites the public to submit names and poems which will be included on a special DVD. The DVD will be adhered to the MAVEN spacecraft and launched to Mars on Nov. 18, 2013. Credit: NASA/GSFC
A forthcoming NASA launch to Mars could be in danger of losing its launch window should a shutdown in the United States federal government that began today (Oct. 1) continue for a while. That’s just one of the ways in which NASA is affected amid a lapse of funding that is affecting all government agencies and an untold number of government contractors.
Around 97% of NASA’s 18,000 employees are off the job. Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and other social media accounts are going dark. NASA’s website is being pulled offline. NASA Television has also ceased broadcasting.
Beyond the agency’s public face, activities ranging from certain commercial crew payouts, to conference attendance, to scientific work will cease. Awards and scholarship approvals will be delayed.
“NASA will shut down almost entirely,” said President Barack Obama in a speech late Monday (Sept. 30).
In addition to the agency’s public relations activities, NASA is planning to launch the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft to Mars in November to examine the Red Planet’s atmosphere. There are all sorts of questions vexing scientists concerning that planet, with one of the most prominent ones being why the atmosphere thinned over the years.
Media reports indicate that if the shutdown is lengthy, MAVEN could miss the launch window and have to try again in 2016.
“A shutdown could delay the pre-launch processing currently under way with a possible impact to the scheduled Nov. 18 launch date,” Dwayne Brown, a NASA senior public affairs officer at NASA, told The Planetary Society in a story published yesterday (Sept. 30). The launch window extends for several weeks beyond that time, however.
The 3% of NASA employees who are deemed essential will work without pay until the situation is resolved. These are some of the things that will continue:
The International Space Station. Credit: NASA
International Space Station monitoring will be maintained, but with the bare minimum of ground crew. (NASA will cease regular updates of the astronauts’ activities during the furlough, although we presume if something urgent happened there would be an update.)
Robotic missions that are already in operation — think the Cassini spacecraft circling Saturn, or the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) winging its way to the moon — will have small crews making sure that they are functioning properly. No scientific analysis will be conducted, though.
Certain other programs will continue if a shutdown would be detrimental to their performance. Space News reports that the much-delayed James Webb Space Telescope will be among them, as some of its instruments are undergoing cryogenic vacuum testing at the Goddard Space Flight Center.
Update, 1:09 p.m. EDT: Several missions run out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Applied Physics Laboratory are running as usual for at least the next week because these facilities are running under contracted money from NASA and still have funds in the bank. According to the Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla: “At JPL, that includes: Curiosity; Opportunity; Odyssey; Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter; Cassini; Dawn; Juno; Spitzer; the Voyagers; and WISE, among many others. At APL, that includes MESSENGER and New Horizons. It also includes the Deep Space Network.”
Additional Update, 2:09 p.m. EDT: The HiRISE twitter account just replied to inquiries from several space journalists that they will be “open for business” as usual, which is great news since the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter made an audacious attempt to take images of Comet ISON during the comet’s closest approach to Mars today. We’ll provide any news and updates on images as they become available, but the HiRISE team said getting the images back to Earth and processing them may take a day or two.
HiRISE is still open for business and updates will continue as usual.
Many observers noted that NASA is marking its 55th anniversary today by shutting down its activities. There’s no word yet on when the deadlock in Congress will be resolved. The last two shutdowns in 1995 and 1996 (which began in the middle of the STS-74 shuttle mission to Mir) lasted several weeks.
Cloud map of Kepler-7b (left) in comparison to Jupiter (right). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MIT
Call it cloudy with a low chance of meatballs. The alien world Kepler-7b — a very reflective world in big telescopes — has clouds in its upper atmosphere. And scientists have actually been able to map those out, despite the planet’s great distance from Earth (at least 1,000 light-years away.)
It’s the first time scientists have been able to map out clouds on a world outside of the solar system. If we can see clouds, then we can begin to think about what a planet’s climate will be, making this an important milestone in understanding the conditions on other worlds.
“Kepler-7b reflects much more light than most giant planets we’ve found, which we attribute to clouds in the upper atmosphere,” stated Thomas Barclay, Kepler scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “Unlike those on Earth, the cloud patterns on this planet do not seem to change much over time — it has a remarkably stable climate.”
Illustration of the Kepler spacecraft (NASA/Kepler mission/Wendy Stenzel)
Here’s how scientists got it done:
Preliminary observations with the Kepler space telescope –which was designed to hunt planets until a second reaction wheel failed earlier this year — found “moon-like phases” on Kepler-7b. These showed a bright spot on the western hemisphere.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope measured Kepler-7b’s temperature using infrared light, calculating it at between 1,500 and 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (815 and 982 degrees Celsius.)
Something was clearly going on, as the planet is extremely close to its star; only 0.06 Earth-sun distances away. The temperature was too cool. They figured out that the light was reflected off cloud tops on the planet’s west side.
Another cool fact — Kepler-7b, like Saturn, would float if it was put in a big enough tub of water!
You can read more details in the technical paper online here. The study, which was led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been accepted to the Astrophysical Journal, but not published yet.
Black holes are a spot in the universe where you won’t see the sun shine in, to paraphrase that 1960s rock-musical Hair. But speaking of “hair”, a group of scientists says these singularities may have matter (sometimes referred to as “hair”) that could affect how they appear.
This is a tangled concept to figure out (so to speak), so let’s unpack what the new study in Physical Review Letters means.
When black hole understanding was still in its infancy in the scientific literature, physicist John Wheeler wrote a phrase that is now famous among scientists in that field: “Black holes have no hair.” His phrase referred to how black holes are defined, which he believed came down to only two factors: their mass, and their angular momentum, or the rotation velocity of the hole. (Some sources also say electric charge was included as a third factor.)
Say you have a black hole that was created out of a huge star that imploded. Even though the star itself had distinctive properties, this theory says they would vanish in a black hole. So to take that to a generality, Wheeler’s phrase said all black holes are essentially the same.
Artist concept of matter swirling around a black hole. (NASA/Dana Berry/SkyWorks Digital)
This understanding of black holes dates back to 1963, arising back to a “clean” black hole model first published by Roy Kerr. The new study agrees that Kerr’s work from 50 years ago works with general relativity, a theory from Einstein that (in very simple terms) says the laws of nature are consistent throughout the universe. (More at this past Universe Today article.) As the theory pertains to black holes, strong sources of gravity bend space and time.
Kerr’s theory, however, does not agree with extensions of Einstein’s work, the scientists said. These extensions are known as scalar-tensor theories and there are several variations on this topic. The physics deals with the interactions between two different types of fields, scalar and tensor. Scalar fields, according to this Massachusetts Institute of Technology paper, assign values for every point of space observed. (Think a temperature map of Mars). Tensor fields measure these variables with relation to each other.
This artist’s impression shows the surroundings of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the active galaxy NGC 3783 in the southern constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur). Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser
The science team included Thomas Sotiriou, a physicist at the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy.
His team, Sotiriou said in a statement, “focused on the matter that normally surrounds realistic black holes, those observed by astrophysicists. This matter forces the pure and simple black hole hypothesized by Kerr to develop a new ‘charge’ (the hair, as we call it) which anchors it to the surrounding matter, and probably to the entire universe.
“According to our calculations,” he added, “the growth of the black hole’s hair is accompanied by the emission of distinctive gravitational waves.”
The rock chosen for the first contact science investigations for the Curiosity rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A strange rock encountered by the Mars Curiosity rover early in its mission has few similarities to other rocks found on the Red Planet, a new study says. In fact, the “Jake_M” rock is most similar to a rare kind of Earth rock called a mugearite, which is often found in ocean islands and continental rift zones.
“Such rocks are so uncommon on Earth that it would be highly unlikely that, if you landed a spacecraft on Earth in a random location, the first rock you encountered within a few hundred meters of your landing site would be an alkaline rock like Jake_M,” stated Edward Stolper, a geology professor at the California Institute of Technology.
Jake_M is named after Jacob “Jake” Matijevic, a Curiosity operations systems chief engineer who died two weeks after the rover landed last year. The rock was sampled about two weeks after Curiosity hit the surface, and was revealed to have sodium and potassium in it (which makes it chemically alkaline.)
The NASA team threw in every bit of data they could to model the Mars Curiosity landing. Credit: NASA
It’s probable that the rock came to be, the scientists said, after partially melting in the interior of Mars and then coming up to the surface. “As it cooled, crystals formed, and the chemical composition of the remaining liquid changed (just as, in the making of rock candy, a sugar-water solution becomes less sweet as it cools and sugar crystallizes from it),” CalTech stated.
Models examining the formation conditions suggest that Jake_M originated from an area some tens of miles or kilometers in the interior of Mars relative to the surface, and that the magma it formed in might have had a reasonably high proportion of dissolved water. This type of magma (called alkaline magma) is uncommon on Earth, but may be more common on Mars than previously believed.
You can read more details about the rock, as well as a series of four other papers published about science from MSL in the Sept. 27 edition of Science.
The Hulk (Bruce Banner), as portrayed in The Avengers. Credit: Marvel & Subs
When Bruce Banner gets angry, he gets big and green and strong and well, vengeful. The Hulk is the stuff of comic book legend and as Mark Ruffalo recently showed us in The Avengers, Banner’s/Hulk’s personality can transform on a dime.
Turns out rapid transformations are the case in astronomy, too! Scientists found a peculiar neutron star that can change from radio pulsar, to X-ray pulsar, back and forth. In the Hulk’s case, a big dose of gamma rays likely fuelled his ability to transform. This star’s superpowers, however, likely come from a companion star.
“What we’re seeing is a star that is the cosmic equivalent of ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ with the ability to change from one form to its more intense counterpart with startling speed,” stated Scott Ransom, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
“Though we have known that X-ray binaries — some of which are observed as X-ray pulsars — can evolve over millions of years to become rapidly spinning radio pulsars, we were surprised to find one that seemed to swing so quickly between the two.”
A neutron star and its companion flipping between accretion (when it emits X-rays) and when accretion has stopped (when it emits radio pulses). Credit: Bill Saxton; NRAO/AUI/NSF. Animation by Elizabeth Howell
The star’s double personality came to light after astronomers made an accidental double-discovery. IGR J18245-2452, as the star is called, was flagged as a millisecond radio pulsar in 2005 using the National Science Foundation’s Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. Then this year, another team found an X-ray pulsar in the same region of the star cluster M28.
It took a little while to sort out the confusion, we’re sure, but eventually astronomers realized it was the same object behaving differently. That said, they were mighty confused: “This was particularly intriguing because radio pulses don’t come from an X-ray binary and the X-ray source has to be long gone before radio signals can emerge,” stated lead researcher Alessandro Papitto, who is with of Institute of Space Sciences in Catalunya (Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya) in Spain.
The key, it turns out, comes from the interplay with the star’s companion. Material doesn’t flow continuously, as astronomers previously believed is true of these system types, but in bunches. Starting and stopping the flow then led to swings in the behavior, making the star alternate between X-ray and radio emissions.
– A neutron star that has a normal star nearby forms an X-ray binary, which happens when the neutron star poaches starstuff off its companion. When the material hits the neutron star, the stuff gets really hot and emits X-rays.
– When the material stops, magnetic fields on the neutron produce radio waves. These appear to blink on and off from the perspective of Earth, as the neutron rotates super-fast (several times a second).
In the case of IGR J18245-2452, it behaved like an X-ray binary star for about a month, stopped suddenly, and then sent out radio waves for a while before flipping back again. (A month is less than a blink in astronomical terms, when you recall the universe is 13.8 billion years old.)
To take the longer view, astronomers used to believe that X-ray binaries could evolve into radio emitters over time. Now, though, it appears a star can be these two things at almost the same time.
“During periods when the mass flow is less intense, the magnetic field sweeps away the gas and prevents it from reaching the surface and creating X-ray emission,” NASA stated. “With the region around the neutron star relatively gas free, radio signals can easily escape and astronomers detect a radio pulsar.”
A whole suite of telescopes in Earth and space contributed to this discovery, but of note: the X-ray source was first spotted with the International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL). You can read more details in the paper published in Nature.
Early on, Mars had giant active volcanoes, which would have released significant methane. Because of methane’s high greenhouse potential, even a thin atmosphere might have supported liquid water. Credit: NASA
Using a phone to search for signs of life? Yeah, we can get behind that. One group of researchers has a system that they’ve been testing out in analog environments with the aim of (eventually, one day, they hope) it being applied, say, to other planets — such as Mars.
Here’s how it works:
“Initially the human astrobiologist takes images of his/her surroundings using a mobile phone camera. These images are sent via Bluetooth to a laptop, which processes the images to detect novel colors and textures, and communicates back to the astrobiologist the degree of similarity to previous images stored in the database,” read a press release on the technology.
View of Mars’ surface near the north pole from the Phoenix lander. Credit: NASA/JPL-Calech/University of Arizona
The aim is to eventually have robots, if necessary, do the same thing on Mars or in other locations. Field tests have been done in Martian analog environments, with intriguing results.
“In our most recent tests at a former coal mine in West Virginia, the similarity-matching by the computer agreed with the judgement of our human geologists 91% of the time,” stated Patrick McGuire, who works in Freie Universität’s planetary sciences and remote sensing department in Germany.
“The novelty detection also worked well, although there were some issues in differentiating between features that are similar in color but different in texture, like yellow lichen and sulfur-stained coalbeds. However, for a first test of the technique, it looks very promising.”
You can check out more details in this paper on Arxiv, a site that publishes articles before they are peer-reviewed. The information has also been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Astrobiology.
Artist's concept of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope surrounded by examples of exoplanets it has looked at. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
After 10 years in space — looking at so many galaxies and stars and other astronomy features — the Spitzer Space Telescope is being deployed for new work: searching for alien worlds.
The telescope is designed to peer in infrared light (see these examples!), the wavelength in which heat is visible. When looking at infrared light from exoplanets, Spitzer can figure out more about their atmospheric conditions. Over time, it can even detect brightness differences as the planet orbits its sun, or measure the temperature by looking at how much the brightness declines when the planet goes behind its star. Neat stuff overall.
“When Spitzer launched back in 2003, the idea that we would use it to study exoplanets was so crazy that no one considered it,” stated Sean Carey of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center, which is at the California Institute of Technology. “But now the exoplanet science work has become a cornerstone of what we do with the telescope.”
Of course, the telescope wasn’t designed to do this. But to paraphrase the movie Apollo 13, NASA was interested in what the telescope could do while it’s in space — especially because the planet-seeking Kepler space telescope has been sidelined by a reaction wheel problem. Redesigning Spitzer, in a sense, took three steps.
An example of Spitzer’s past work: This image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows infrared light from the Sunflower galaxy, otherwise known as Messier 63. Spitzer’s view highlights the galaxy’s dusty spiral arms. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Fixing the wobble: Spitzer is steady, but not so steady that it could easily pick out the small bit of light that an exoplanet emits. Engineers determined that the telescope actually wobbled regularly and would wobble for an hour. Looking into the problem further, they discovered it’s because a heater turns on to keep the telescope battery’s temperature regulated.
“The heater caused a strut between the star trackers and telescope to flex a bit, making the position of the telescope wobble compared to the stars being tracked,” NASA stated. In October 2010, NASA decided to cut the heating back to 30 minutes because the battery only needs about 50 per cent of the heat previously thought. Half the wobble and more exoplanets was more the recipe they were looking for.
The Spitzer Space Telescope. Credit: NASA
Repurposing a camera: Spitzer has a pointing control reference sensor “peak-up” camera on board, which originally gathered up infrared light to funnel to a spectrometer. It also calibrated the telescope’s star-tracker pointing devices. The same principle was applied to infrared camera observations, putting stars in the center of camera pixels and allowing a better view.
Remapping a camera pixel: The scientists charted the variations in a single pixel of the camera that showed them which were the most stable areas for observations. For context, about 90% of Spitzer’s exoplanet observations are about a 1/4 of a pixel wide.
That’s pretty neat stuff considering that Spitzer’s original mission was just 2.5 years, when it had coolant on board to allow three temperature-sensitive science instruments to function. Since then, engineers have set up a passive cooling system that lets one set of infrared cameras keep working.
Chinese taikonauts (from left) Liu Yang, Jing Haipeng and Liu Wang. Credit: www.news.cn
China’s human spaceflight program may soon be opening the door to foreign astronauts. The Asian nation has so far been forging ahead with a small space station and its own flights, independent of the multinational collaboration taking place with the International Space Station, although it has done work with Russia and France.
Last week, however, a Chinese official said the country is considering bringing foreign astronauts on board its spacecraft and also providing training for them.
“We would like to train astronauts from other countries and organizations that have such a demand, and we would be glad to provide trips to foreign astronauts,” said Yang Liwei, deputy director of China Manned Space Agency, in a report from China Daily.
Launch of Shenzhou 7. Credit: PR China
“We will also welcome foreign astronauts who have received our training to work in our future space station.”
Yang’s remarks came at the United Nations/China Workshop on Human Space Technology. The director also pointed out that European astronauts have visited the Chinese facilities, and vice versa, which could point the way forward to more work between the nations.
China’s most recent spaceflight took place in June. Shenzhou 10 docked with a small space station in orbit (Tiangong-1.) The country is reportedly planning a larger space station in the coming years and possibly, some manned lunar missions.
Abigail Harrison just prior to the launch of her mentor astronaut, Luca Parmitano, in Kazakhstan May 28, 2013. Credit: Abigail Harrison
Meet Abigail Harrison. This teenager’s enthusiasm about space so impressed Luca Parmitano — who just happens to be a European Space Agency astronaut on the space station right now — that the two have a social media collaboration going.
Abby collects questions from readers of her blog (AstronautAbby.com) and sends them up to the station for Parmitano to read and respond to.
Parmitano’s first mission in space, which he calls Volare (“Fly”), has been a busy one. He’s driven a rover, practiced grappling techniques for the Cygnus spacecraft — which was delayed in its docking to Tuesday (now Saturday) — and experienced two spacewalks (one went to plan, and the other was cut short due to a spacesuit leak).
Meanwhile, Abby had a space-y summer of her own. She fundraised thousands of dollars to see Parmitano’s launch in May. Then she went to Space Camp and toured several NASA and international agency centers. We caught up with Abby to find out how things are going — and if this brings her any closer to her dream of going to space herself. Below is a slightly edited e-mail conversation about her adventures.
Universe Today: How’s it going with the partnership?
Abigail Harrison: Working with Luca has been a lot of fun! I have really enjoyed being able to e-mail with him on station and especially the opportunity I had to talk to him while visiting Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL at the end of July. The AstronautAbby community has been very active sharing images of the Space Station flying by for my #CatchLuca weekly blog post, and the #AskLuca questions submitted by my community have been great. It’s fun to hear how Luca answers these questions each week.
UT: What are the best things that you have been doing specifically to spread the message of Volare?
AH: I think my #CatchLuca blog series has been a real hit! So many people from around the world have taken photos of the ISS passing overhead and decided to submit them and share with the world. It’s been great! I think this helps to spread the message as it is people on Earth getting excited about the space station and sharing their own pictures. The more sharing that happens, the more aware people get about the mission and the more they learn.
Luca Parmitano, a European Space Agency astronaut, is on his first voyage to space as a part of Expeditions 36/37. Credit: NASA
The #AskLuca series has also been very successful. It’s true, anyone can jump on social media and ask a question of Luca or any astronaut and they most likely will answer it, but this series has allowed people who may not be socially savvy to ask questions, as well as people to ask longer questions. The fact that all the answers are published on my blog is also great as people can read it in a published article versus on a social media update.
UT: Tell us more about these NASA tours you’ve been doing lately. What is your goal in doing them?
AH: I have been fortunate to be in the right places at the right time. This summer I was in Houston for a gymnastics camp, and therefore I was able to tour the Johnson Space Center – but not just tour the center, I got to see the Neutral Buoyancy Lab and compare it to the Russian counterpart that I saw in May during my visit to Star City [astronaut training complex in Russia] when attending Luca’s launch. I also was able to go on the floor of Mission Control and see a specialized robotics lab, along with a lot of other cool things.
Abigail Harrison simulates repairing a satellite during Space Camp in Huntsville, AL. Credit: Abigail Harrison
After Houston, I headed to Huntsville for Space Camp. While in Huntsville I was able to tour the Marshall Space Flight Center and specifically see some of the work NASA is doing along with ATK to build the Space Launch System, which is the rocket system that will take me to Mars someday (similar but much bigger than the Saturn V rockets that took Apollo to the moon).
Finally, I visited Lockheed Martin’s facilities in Colorado to see the production of the Orion, which is the spacecraft currently being developed to go to Mars, the moon and asteroids. These visits have tremendous value as I have been able to share pictures, write about the visits and talk about what I have seen with people everywhere.
The goal is to learn about what is being done right now to realize the future American missions to Mars, the moon and asteroids and continue human space flight. The more I learn and understand about our current efforts to realize the future of human space exploration, the easier it is for me to talk about the future and educate the general public. Part of my mission is to help spread the word to people around the world about the future of human space flight and get the public excited for what we will do next.
Abigail Harrison with subscale test rocket motors during a visit to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. Credit: Abigail Harrison
UT: I’m sure you’ve been talking to Luca regularly. What do you talk about?
AH: We e-mail and tweet quite a bit. We have only talked once. To be honest, I follow his mission very closely through his online updates and ESA and NASA updates for my role as his Earth Liaison, and therefore I am up to date on what he is doing, probably more up to date than most people.
When we e-mail and talk it is usually about other things like advice on school, travel (he lives in Houston so gave me some good tips on what to see while visiting), and generally asking him how he is doing and what it is like to live and work on the ISS. It’s not that different from when he was training for his mission on Earth, except for now he is flying in space overhead and his e-mails and tweets come from space. 🙂
UT: Do you feel any closer to being in space as a result of this partnership?
AH: Yes, I do. How could I not? I would guess that anyone who personally knows an astronaut living on the ISS would feel closer to being in space. The personal connection means you are paying close attention to everything the astronaut is doing, and following the mission very closely.
The fact that I am sharing so much of what Luca is doing as part of my role as his Earth Liaison also helps me feel closer to being in space, because I am sharing with so many people and they in turn offer me support everyday towards my goals. I watch Luca and can imagine the day when it’s my turn to go into space. It’s been an incredible experience to get to be part of his mission.
