How to be an Astronaut? & What’s Up With Space Junk?
Join us for a double-header talk right from the “Bridge” of ESA – featuring two of the awesome flight controllers keeping Europe’s missions safe in space.
This first part of the talk will feature Andrea Boyd, who will share her perspective of human spaceflight keeping Europe’s astronauts safe in orbit. You’ll hear all about what it takes to become an astronaut and what life is like for a European astronaut, how we support their flights in space and what’s going on in the world of Human Spaceflight in Europe. Spoiler alert(!) – there’s a lot going on – ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer (German) has just returned from the International Space Station and Samantha Cristoforetti (Italian) has just arrived, and along with all of that we’re currently selecting our next class of astronauts including our first parastronaut.
The second part will feature Thomas Ormston, who doesn’t have people to look after in space but does have to keep the twin Sentinel-1 spacecraft safe while flying through an ever increasing pile of junk in low Earth orbit! The current environment in orbit continues to get worse with jumps in the number of objects from the recent anti-satellite weapon test and an explosion (thankfully not yet literally!) in the number of spacecraft being launched with the advent of megaconstellations. Thomas will talk about how we dodge this junk and keep our satellites safe, what the impact of doing that is and how we can all be better users of space, including what needs to be done to ensure a sustainable and usable environment in space for the future.