Special to Siasat News By Mohammed Siddique Dubai.
United Arab Emirates UAE is sending its first astronaut, Hazza Al Mansouri to be rocketed into space on September 25th from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome.
The 8 days long space expedition makes it the 19th country in the world to visit the ISS (International Space Station). Hazza will be accompanied by NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Russian Commander Oleg Skripochka during the trip.
As part of the expedition, Hazza will be conducting a total of 16 biological, physical, and geological experiments, including a few on himself that are not possible in the conditions prevailing on planet earth and compare the results with the ones obtained on earth. While in space, he will also be attending 5 video calls in order to answer queries with main focus applied on the questions asked by UAE youths.
He will be carrying, the Quran, 100 per cent silk UAE Flag, 30 seeds of Al Ghaf the national tree of UAE, materials for the scientific research such as inflatable balls representing Mars and Earth, Emirati food, personal belongings including pictures of his family and other personal items, photo of late UAE President ,Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan.
The estimated flight time to the ISS is 6 hours which will be achieved with a flight speed of 25000 km/h. The trip back to earth has been scheduled for the 4th of October, which will be completed in a time span of 3.5 hours as and when the Spacecraft lands in Kazakhstan.
In order to be able to be a part of the expedition, Hazza along with backup astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi spent a total of 1400 hours training and attended 90+ training courses. Hazza had also posted a video of himself on twitter where he spent 10 minutes on a spinning chair in order to overcome motion sickness, which he did every day during his training period. End.