Emirati astronauts Hazzaa Al Mansoori and Sultan Al Neyadi are undergoing a fit check of their Sokol space suits and the Soyuz seat liner at the Zvezda facility in Moscow, Dubai officials have announced.

The Dubai Media Office in its Twitter account said, “First Emirati astronauts, Hazzaa Al Mansoori and Sultan Al Neyadi, undergoing a fit check of their Sokol space suits and the Soyuz seat liner at the Zvezda facility in Moscow…”

Hazzaa and Sultan have completed their training earlier this month at the European Astronaut Centre (EAC) of the European Space Agency (ESA) in Cologne, Germany. The training focused on the European unit, Columbus, onboard the International Space Station (ISS). Part of the training was attended by his Excellency Yousuf Hamad AlShaibani, Director General of MBRSC, and Salem AlMarri, Assistant Director General for Scientific and Technical Affairs at MBRSC and Head of the UAE Astronaut Programme. This is part of the preparations for the first Emirati astronaut to travel to the ISS on 25 September aboard the Soyuz MS 15, and part of the overall training plan for the two Emirati astronauts.

The astronauts completed around 30 hours of theoretical and practical training, supervised by a group of ESA specialists, focusing on the equipment and systems in the European unit of the ISS, such as the Life Support System that ensures the survival of astronauts in ISS. The training, all performed in a real like module of the European laboratory aboard ISS, Columbus, also included communicating with the ground station. The Columbus Laboratory is ESA’s largest single contribution to the ISS, shared by NASA and ESA to carry out the largest number of scientific researches in a virtually non-gravitational environment.

Under the supervision of researchers and trainers from ESA, the two astronauts were trained on the scientific experiments the UAE astronaut will be working on during his time onboard. The training programme included four main types of scientific experiments: Time perception in microgravity (TIME), Brain DTI, Fluidics (fluid dynamics in space), and DNAm-age, which tests the changes that happen to human’s DNA due to travelling to space; it will be the first time that this experiment will be carried out on a human from the Arab region.

HE AlShaibani was briefed on the training during an introductory tour to the various training departments at EAC, where he was shown the latest technologies and advanced and highly efficient scientific equipment used to train the two astronauts.