Andreas Mogensen returned to Earth in mid-March after a six-and-a-half month stint aboard the Worldwide House Station. To mark his tenure as a part of NASA’s Crew-7 mission, the Danish European House Company (ESA) astronaut has shared his memento from undock day—a guided video tour of the ISS.
It’s been a month now since I left the Worldwide @Space_Station.
One of many final issues that I did on undock day, was movie a tour of the House Station. It’s as a lot a souvenir for me as it’s a means for me to share the surprise of the Worldwide House Station with you.… pic.twitter.com/oFR0VXR06A
— Andreas Mogensen (@Astro_Andreas) April 12, 2024
“It’s been a month now since I left the [ISS],” Mogensen posted to X early Friday morning. “… It’s as a lot a souvenir for me as it’s a means for me to share the surprise of the Worldwide House Station with you. Every time I’ll miss my time onboard ISS, and particularly my crewmates, I’ll have this video to take a look at.”
Mogensen started his show-and-tell within the area station’s entrance finish, above which a docked SpaceX Dragon craft awaited to take him residence on March 12. On his left is the roughly 114-by-22-foot Columbus module—a science laboratory supplied by the ESA again in 2008. Throughout from the lab is the smaller Japanese Experiment Module (JEM), nicknamed Kibō, which arrived not lengthy after Columbus.
From there, Mogensen gives a first-person have a look at varied different ISS services, together with workstations, storage items, loos, health club tools, a number of docking nodes, and even the station kitchen. After all, given the fragile atmosphere, that module appears to be like extra like one other lab than an precise place to prepare dinner meals—presumably as a result of, effectively, nobody is definitely cooking something up there.
However probably the most gorgeous space in your complete ISS is undoubtedly the cupola, which gives a 360-degree panoramic view of Earth, in addition to a good have a look at the area station’s general dimension.
[Related: What a total eclipse looks like from the ISS.]
Talking of which, Mogenen’s video additionally does an important job showcasing simply how comparatively small the ISS actually is, even after over 25 years of module and tools additions. At 356-feet-long, it’s only one yard shy of the size of a soccer area, however any given module or transit area is just a few toes vast. Issue within the copious quantities of cargo, tools, provides, experiment supplies, in addition to the over 8-miles of cabling that wire its electrical methods, and it makes for fairly tight residing circumstances. Close to the top of Mogensen’s tour, it solely takes him somewhat over a minute to glide by way of many of the complete station again to his unique place to begin.
After all, none of that undercuts one in every of humanity’s most monumental achievements in area exploration. Though the ISS is nearing the top of its tenure (it’s scheduled for decommission in 2031), Mogensen’s souvenir is a good doc of what life is like aboard the habitat. However for these now on the lookout for an much more detailed tour, there’s at all times NASA’s digital walkthrough.
