Spending nearly 200 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS) is first and foremost an extraordinary scientific adventure.
The station is a state-of-the-art laboratory that covers an area the size of a soccer field and has a volume similar to that of a jumbo jet.
Scientists from all over the world take full advantage of the space environment, particularly weightlessness, to have research carried out by astronauts, obtaining results that would be unattainable on Earth.
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Life and work on board the ISS
Every day, the crew of the International Space Station, in cooperation with the control centre and laboratories, undertake intricate experiments in physiology, fluid mechanics, materials physics, cell biology, immunology, neurology, the list goes on.
Astronauts are the eyes and ears of the teams on the ground, but they are also often the guinea pigs for experiments that are as complex as they are innovative, designed to advance research and knowledge.
Better alloys, vaccines, more effective medical treatments, new technologies, more resistant plants: the list of benefits that has resulted from this work is long.
A significant part of our activity also consists of preparing future missions. Today’s studies aboard the ISS are making tomorrow’s missions to the Moon and Mars possible.
In addition to these scientific pursuits, our daily life is punctuated by the maintenance and logistical tasks that are essential to operating and maintaining the spacecraft and ensuring its proper functioning.
These activities are also essential to making human life possible in the most inhospitable environment imaginable: total emptiness and extreme temperatures some 250 miles (400 km) above planet Earth.
If we add the two and a half hours of daily exercise that are vital to stay in shape as well as other less frequent but still demanding tasks, such as space walks and the arrival and departure of supply vessels, there is very little time left for photography!
Seeing Earth from space
However, all astronauts have the same reaction when they witness the beauty of Earth: They try to capture it.
Since the advent of digital photography, it seems every astronaut returns from space with a large collection of photos.
It’s often on a Sunday evening or during a rare moment of leisure in the Cupola — our panoramic window that offers the best view of the ISS itself (that’s its purpose) but also of Earth and the stars — that the clicks are made.
The curve of the Earth in the early morning, snow-capped mountains in the distance, intriguing shapes in the middle of a desert, the bright colours of a sea or vegetation, everything invites you to point your camera and try to do justice to nature’s spectacle.
After a few months, you know the planet by heart, and it’s possible to identify the area of the globe over which you’re traveling at a glance.
You first take fairly generic photos: coastlines, mountain ranges, countries.
With a little more effort and time, you start to find more specific targets, such as a favourite city or natural or human-made site.
You find yourself zooming in on these subjects with a bigger lens.
Finally, if you are lucky enough to spend many weeks on board, which usually occurs over several missions, and dedicate your free time to photography, you begin to capture more difficult shots at night (such as cities that are tiny points of light in the distance, impossible to capture clearly at first), original compositions, long exposures, shots of the stars and the Milky Way and time-lapse sequences.
I caught the photography bug during my first mission, and it spread to my crew during my second one.
Between us, we took half a million photos. We documented our activities, of course, but the vast majority were views of planet Earth — I’ve counted over 245,000 of my own.
The Earth in our Hands
What experience is more magical? What adventure could surpass that of traveling into space? To go there again! This book was born out of the undiminished—perhaps even intensified — wonder I experienced with my second mission orbiting Earth.
With this book, rather than trying to share my entire photographic account of 200 days in orbit — a real mission impossible — or compiling a collection of scientific data, I want to create a lovingly detailed portrait of Earth.
I hope to share this profound feeling, so difficult to fully grasp, with as many people as possible. In so many ways, we live on an island of life and beauty that is unique but fragile, threatened and lost in the hostile immensity of the cosmos.
This adapted excerpt was taken from The Earth in Our Hands by Thomas Pesquet, with permission from Firefly Books Ltd.
The book is published by Firefly Books.
