Pumpkins, stockings and celebrations in orbit!
From makeshift costumes to freeze-dried thanksgiving meals, space travelers at the International Space Station have come up with unique ways to celebrate the holidays over the years.
The astronauts of Apollo 8 celebrated Christmas as they circled the moon in 1968. They famously read passages from the Bible, which were broadcast back to Earth.
Now decades later, astronauts continue to find fun ways to celebrate the holidays. From presents to unique “pumpkin” carvings, the celebrations continue in orbit.
Nicole Stott, a veteran NASA astronaut, aquanaut and artist said during Halloween, she and her crew carved oranges instead of pumpkins, and even crafted their own costumes from things around the space station.
“I made a like a ballerina skirt out of this thermal cover from a Japanese cargo vehicle, this cover that covered up the hatch, and it was gorgeous,” Stott said. “It was this copper, long flowing skirt-looking thing. We scavenged to come up with our costumes, and we made a point of communicating with the ground about it.”
Another holiday Stott had the chance to celebrate in orbit was Thanksgiving. While the crew wasn’t sent to the space station with a giant Butterball turkey, she said the folks on the ground made sure to send a special food pack for them.
“It was nice because you had the green beans, the little pack of turkey and the mashed potatoes and gravy, and even if you had to rehydrate them,” Stott said. “It was kind of cool to just be thinking about it as the celebration we knew we were going to have.”
While Stott didn’t spend Christmas off our planet, she was prepared to. Because flights can be delayed and her mission could have been extended, she launched knowing she could be at the station well after her planned return.
“I had some gifts from my family,” Stott said. “Little things that the ground flew up in a care package, these very fun stockings that somebody on the ground team had like handmade these, very collapsible but very thoughtful, personalized stockings to have on board. While I didn't get to enjoy those in space, because I came home the day after Thanksgiving, I was able to bring them home with me.”
For Stott, those gifts and Christmas crafts then had a very special meaning: they traveled back and forth to space with her.
Scanning our skies with fresh eyes
NASA has officially finished building the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Roman will scan the universe for things like exoplanets and even search for dark matter.
It’s designed for large scale surveys and can observe hundreds of millions of galaxies, beaming back roughly a terabyte of data each day. Joshua Schlieder, a deputy senior project scientist for NASA's Roman Space Telescope, said this telescope follows in the footsteps of some of the other famous instruments, like Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope.
From a wide field imaging camera that can take large scans of our universe to an instrument that can show the planets around another faraway star, Roman will be one of NASA’s most powerful instruments.
“This will be the deepest, highest resolution, multi-wavelength imaging survey of our galactic plane ever done,” Schielder said. “We expect that we will resolve and individually detect and measure the brightness for some 20 billion stars in our own galaxy. That's about 1/5 of the stars in our own galaxy. What I'm trying to convey here is that Roman's core science and the general astrophysics science, it builds on what has come before, but it really is at a new scale.”
Roman is expected to launch in 2027, but the launch could happen as early as in 2026. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket will deliver the telescope into space, where Roman will then get to its final spot about a million miles from our planet.
“We're now at a point where, over many years, this observatory has gone from ideas in the community to designs on paper to individual pieces of hardware to now being a fully built observatory,” Schielder said. “The final two large portions of the observatory just got integrated together to make the complete observatory as of the end of November. So, it was a very exciting time. We now have a complete observatory.”
