ESA’s VITA Mission — what’s it all about?
This time last week there was a lot of hype over the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) latest mission to the International Space Station (ISS)…
Wait… I’m sorry? You have no idea what I’m talking about?
Well, I can’t say I’m not surprised as nowadays human spaceflight rarely makes it in to mainstream news. For this reason I’m always pleasantly surprised when I cross paths with someone who has not yet heard of the space station — pleasantly because it means I get to talk about my favourite subject, and trust me I will never tire of it! Assuming you have never heard of the space station, where did you think our astronauts have been going all these years? Hmm…
I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but we haven’t been back to the moon since Gene Cernan last set foot there in 1972. Since then mankind has remained in low Earth orbit — our new destination and temporary home: the International Space Station.
For those of you who have yet to stumble across this magnificent feat of engineering in anything you’ve ever seen or read before, the ISS is a spacecraft that orbits the Earth, like a satellite, at around 27000km per hour (7.66km/s to be exact, or approximately 5 miles per second! Fast right?!). The space station, in orbit 400km above the Earths surface, is made up of many different parts built and contributed by many different nations around the world — perhaps the biggest collaborative science and engineering effort we have seen to date (I imagine the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) comes a pretty close second!). The components of the ISS were built here on the ground in their respective countries and first sent up for assembly in 1998. Two years later the first manned mission to the space station happened — and we have been sending men and women up there to conduct experiments and maintain the spacecraft ever since!
So back to VITA — what is it?
VITA is the name given to 52nd/53rd expedition to the International Space Station. Would you believe me if I told you this was the 134th flight of a Soyuz spacecraft? And just a second ago you hadn’t even heard of it!
Any time there is a manned mission to the ISS we can only send up three astronauts at a time. This is because the spacecraft that carries them up to space, the Soyuz (see a later blog post dedicated to the Soyuz spacecraft as it deserves its own story — it’s a whole load of awesomeness!) was based on an original design from as far back as the Space Race, to carry a maximum of three people. The VITA mission sees crew members Sergey Ryazansky (Russian Commander), Randy Bresnik (American 2nd Flight Engineer) and Paolo Nespoli (Italian 1st Flight Engineer) joining fellow astronauts Peggy Whitson, Jack Fischer and Fyodor Yurchikhin on the space station, where the launch and docking of the Soyuz MS-05 was screened LIVE last Friday evening.
This mission is significant for Paolo — if you watched it live like I did you’d have noticed a big focus was on him. The name given to the mission, VITA, was chosen by the Italian space agency and stands for Vitality, Innovation, Technology and Ability. Vita also means ‘life’ in Italian. Paolo, who helped design the VITA mission patch/logo has just turned 60 years old! He was one of the first astronauts to go to the space station almost 19 years ago and this trip will be his third and final mission.
This led me to think… age really is just a number! There are astronauts who are in their late 50’s/60’s who are probably in a fitter state than I am. To be an astronaut you have to be in top physical form — there are no exceptions! These guys will be at the peak of their physical fitness and mental agility, and to maintain that level of physical health they will be required to do a minimum of two hours exercise per day up in space. How? Good question, but first let’s just clarify a couple of things. I know over the past few years there have been a good selection of films out that have given the impression that we can have artificial gravity in space. Things like a spinning spacecraft that goes so fast it generates a ‘fake’ gravity (a bit like when you’re on those spinning fairground rides that go so fast you get pulled back in to your seat with such force that you can’t lift your arms and you start to think you and the seat will merge and become some sort of human-chair hybrid. That would be great! The artificial gravity that is, not the hybrid…) however we have yet to develop a way of harvesting gravity, although the search is still on at CERN for the Graviton (a particle some theorists like myself are hoping exists). Up in space there is no gravity and so it is even more important to exercise — without doing so you would lose muscle mass and bone density — not an ideal combination for coming back down to Earth! So engineers and scientists developed resistance exercise machines, the most well known being a running machine with a bungee harness that pulls you down, giving resistance via that ‘fake’ feeling of gravity we spoke about.
Paolo and his comrades will spend approximately 5 months on the space station working between the hours of 7.30am and 8.30pm Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) every day to conduct a range of diverse experiments and maintenance of the spacecraft. They have trained for this moment for years, running launch and docking simulations many times over — but this time it was the real deal. As I tuned in on 28th July 2017 to see their Soyuz rocket launch I watched in anticipation, the concentration in their faces, almost a glimpse of fear and excitement hidden behind the calm demeanour that makes an Astronaut…
To find out more about the VITA mission and the European Space Agency click HERE.
If you have comments or suggestions of science news you’d like to be summed up please comment below or drop me an email! Check out my other blogs coming soon!
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