JAPANESE astronaut Satoshi Furukawa will be joining NASA next space mission, spending about 6 months in the ISS, where they are scheduled to board a spaceship called Crew Dragon.
The Crew Dragon is scheduled to liftoff on August 17 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Furukawa will be joining a team of four members from different space agencies from different parts of the world; Satoshi will be the mission’s specialist together with Russia’s Roscosmos, Konstantin Barisov, the team commander is an American astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, and their Danish pilot from the European Space Agency, Andreas Mogensen.
Furukawa is a graduate of Doctor of Medicine from the University of Tokyo, and in 2000, received a Doctor of Philosophy in Medical Science, also from the University of Tokyo.
On February 1999, he was selected as one of the three Japanese astronauts candidates to work on the ISS by the National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) together with, Akihiko Hoshide and Naoko Yamazaki, he then trained for years, and eventually, became a certified astronaut on January 2001 and a qualified Mission Specialist with NASA on February 2006.
Furukawa said, that he will conduct experiments on how staying in space affects the human body, adding that his tests will prepare people for future expeditions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
This mission will be Furukawa’s second time in International Space Station, after being assigned there as a Flight engineer in 2011 spending165 days on a mission called Expedition 28 and 29.
