On the occasion of the Italian National Day of Space, ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli shares his career highlights and the lessons learned from the perspective of his more than 300 days in orbit on the Space Shuttle and Soyuz missions and a long-duration flight to the International Space Station. With the participation of CERN engineer Slawosz Uznanski, who has just been recruited in the 2022 class of the European Astronaut Corps.
Join the audience in CERN's main auditorium on 16 December at 11 a.m.. Organisation and Moderation: Paola Catapano, IR-ECO-ECP, with the support of the Italian Embassy in Bern, of the Italian General Consulates in Geneva and Zurich, and with the collaboration of the CERN Library.
Paolo Nespoli
Major Paolo Angelo Nespoli is an Italian astronaut and engineer at the European Space Agency (ESA). In 2007, he first traveled into space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery as a mission specialist of STS-120. In December 2010 he again traveled into space aboard the Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft as an Expedition 26/27 flight engineer. Nespoli's third spaceflight was on board Soyuz MS-05, which launched in July 2017 for Expedition 52/53. He has spent more than 300 days on the International space Station. He was also ESA’s oldest active astronaut prior to his retirement in 2019.
Slawosz Uznanski
CERN staff member Slawosz Uznanski, reliability engineer of the LHC new power converters in the Accelerator Systems department (SY), was selected in November to be in the reserve pool of the new class of ESA astronauts. Slawosz, who has held a passion for space and exploration since his early childhood, has successfully passed all the stages of a year-long extremely competitive selection process, which started in summer 2021 with more than 22 500 applicants from ESA Member and Associate Member States. This was the first call for new ESA astronaut applicants since 2008.