LIT Celebrating World Space Week

At 10:15 am on Thursday, October 5th, 2017 LIT will host an event to celebrate World Space Week.

The event will involve a connection with American engineer and former NASA astronaut, Dan Tani who will discuss human spaceflight, his experiences in Space and the future of space exploration. Tani had a 16-year career at NASA, where he flew on 2 space missions for an accumulated 132 days in space, featuring 6 spacewalks, including the 100th spacewalk on the International Space Station.

On his first spaceflight (2001), Dan Tani served as a Mission Specialist on the 12-day STS-108 mission aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour. On his second spaceflight (2007-2008), he served as a Flight Engineer for 4 months aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as a member of the Expedition 16 crew. He was delivered to the ISS as a member of the STS-120 crew aboard Space Shuttle Discovery and was returned to Earth as a member of the STS-122 crew aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis.

There will also be a chance to hear from Dr Peter Downey, LIT lecturer, who will present the international EDEN-ISS project in which LIT is a partner. A critical component of future, human exploration to worlds unknown, will be the supply of edible food for crew members. The goal of the EDEN ISS project is to advance controlled environment agriculture technologies beyond the state-of-the-art. It focuses on ground demonstration of plant cultivation technologies and their application in space. EDEN ISS develops safe food production for onboard the International Space Station (ISS) and for future human space exploration vehicles and planetary outposts.

We will also have the ‘Ireland in Space’ photography exhibition.