A Week in the Life of an Astronaut

Monday: Earth Observation

After your wake-up routine you’ve been assigned to Earth observation duties. Gazing down at Earth from space feels like seeing a shiny jewel floating in the vast and silent universe. From the Cupola window of the ISS, the planet stretches out in a glowing curve – a unique vantage point to snap photographs of the Earth and its wonders. From the deep blues of oceans to the swirling white clouds, the golden orange deserts to the lush green forests, the bright lightning bolts to the dancing shimmers of the aurora borealis – Earth is alive, fragile, and breath-taking as it glimmers softly against the darkness of space.

As the ISS travels around the Earth roughly every 90 minutes on an inclined orbit, it eventually covers over 90% of the inhabited surface of the Earth and presents a unique perspective that simply cannot be obtained from the ground. Looking out of the Cupola window does more than provide an opportunity to capture images of our home: the photographs you take can help track the evolution of our planet. The images support research on our atmosphere, climate change, along with the monitoring of and response to natural disasters including flooding and volcanic eruptions, and more.

With the ISS experiencing 16 sunsets and 16 sunrises every day, night-time imaging of Earth can be used to check if power has been restored to cities after disasters, as well as tracking light pollution to conduct studies of urbanisation.

Daytime monitoring meant that astronaut Jeff Williams was the first person to witness the ash plume from a volcanic eruption of the Cleveland Volcano in Alaska back in 2006 and his observations and imaging of the event allowed him to alert the Alaska Volcano Observatory.

Observing and imaging Earth from space enables scientists and researchers to better comprehend and monitor changes on our planet, and this data allows for more informed responses to natural disasters from an angle you cannot get on Earth.

You wrap up your day with an intense two-hour workout on the bungee treadmill and weight set. This daily ritual keeps your bones strong, your muscles powerful, and your whole body unstoppable in microgravity!

Wednesday: Spacewalk!

Wednesday rolls around and today is the day of your scheduled spacewalk, or Extravehicular Activity (EVA). This EVA was added to the itinerary for the week after an inspection saw that a power regulator had failed. You and a fellow crew mate will be suiting up and venturing out to complete the task in the vacuum of the universe – exciting but terrifying and your first-ever spacewalk! But you’ve prepared for this moment back down on Earth, where part of your astronaut training involved spending time in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL), which is essentially a huge swimming pool with submerged equipment and full scale mock ups of the ISS modules. You’ve donned the spacesuit before and dived into the NBL to practice with equipment and the breathing apparatus in simulated weightlessness. This can’t be much different, right?

You're feeling a bit jumpy though, so you're off for a quick nervous wee! The space toilet isn't your average bathroom break - it uses air to keep you in place whilst your urine gets siphoned away to be recycled into tomorrow's drinking water - cheers! Poo on the other hand, takes a one-way trip. It's stored in a tank and loaded onto an old cargo spacecraft where it eventually blazes through Earth's atmosphere in a flaming finale. For your EVA, you'll be sporting a Maximum Absorbency Garment, or for the non-astronauts in the room, a high-tech, astronaut-sized nappy!

The Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuit takes hours to don (get into) and requires extensive checks before leaving the Quest airlock. Built to protect you against extreme temperatures, radiation, and the vacuum of space, it supplies oxygen, water, and mobility for up to eight hours.

The airlock opens and you use the handrails to pull yourself along to the outside of the space station. Floating in the vast silence of space, Earth comes into view – a radiant marble of swirling blues, greens, and whites, an instant reminder of how delicate our planet is. You keep venturing forwards and you feel your tether, that lifeline, attached from your suit to the station. With the replacement Sequential Shunt Unit, the size of a suitcase clutched in your gloved hand, you head towards Canadarm2, a robotic arm that lends a helping hand in ISS maintenance and moving astronauts around the space station. Locking your boots into place, a crewmate inside operates the arm, swinging you toward the faulty power regulator.

The repair is simple: swap the defective unit for the new one, restoring the station’s solar arrays to full function. With your main task complete, you get to work for a few hours on other minor duties including removing debris and solar panel inspections.

The team inside the ISS announce that it is time to head back to the airlock. You reunite with the crew and celebrate the triumph and success of another spacewalk, and your first one ever!

Friday: Live Conference

It's a big day - your face is about to beam all the way down to Earth! You need to look clean and sharp, but with no showers or running water onboard, you use wet wipes and no-rinse shampoo for that squeaky clean, space-approved glow. And when it’s time to keep your smile camera-ready, you brush as usual. Though there’s no sink to spit into, so you swallow the toothpaste. Minty freshness that defies gravity and prevents cavities!

You're scheduled to video call with a group of Year 5 children from a school in England. These outreach opportunities link students directly to astronauts to provide a unique and authentic experience designed to enhance their learning and overall interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This call will see you demonstrate the effects of microgravity on a non-Newtonian fluid in space: slime!

This experiment is a classic case of curiosity leading to discovery - what happens to slime in space? Over your experimentations, you find that the slime formed into floating blobs like water does, but the water globules are wobbly because of water’s lower viscosity (this is how fast or slow it flows), compared to the slime balls that stabilised into green orbs. When squashed between two paddles, the slime formed a gloopy bridge as the paddles were pulled apart, before snapping and springing back the surface of the paddles.

The experiments provide a clear demonstration of why slime is classified as a non-Newtonian fluid – simply put, this means the slime will break if it is pulled apart but will flow like honey if it is gently poured out of a jar. The information you have collected is not only fun for the students to observe but also provides researchers with data that can be applied to liquid containment in space, as well as investigating if non-Newtonian fluids could be used for watering plants and food crops in space.

You wrap up the video call with some questions that were sent in from the children, including questions about going to the toilet in space (you always get asked this one!), and what your favourite thing about being an astronaut is.