Ed Gibson, a former astronaut and the last person to leave NASA's Skylab space station, said, he will return to space with enthusiasm, if given the opportunity. Gibson, a solar physicist, was among the first group of scientists and astronauts Space chosen to go into space by NASA.
The 84-year-old said, if someone wants to test the effect of zero gravity on tired, older bones, I am available.
And he appeared in a new documentary, In Search of Skylab, by Dwight Stephen Bonnicky about the first and only space station that was completely managed by NASA, in which three separate teams lived for 24 weeks between 1973 and 1974, this station is the predecessor of the International Space Station (ISS) It is one of humanity's greatest engineering achievements.
The station lasted less than a year and only nine astronauts visited the station in three groups of three, however, the Skylab missions were responsible for a host of scientific discoveries before they were largely destroyed in Western Australia in 1979, and the missions provided the scientific community with countless and inestimable information. Pricelessly about our planet, the sun, space and the universe itself.
Gibson, who studied solar physics before joining NASA said, seeing the sun from space was very refreshing because they didn't have anything between their observational instruments at the station and the sun itself. We can look at the corona, the surrounding area. With the sun, just as we do down here. But on Earth we have to wait for a solar eclipse. There we can see the atmosphere of the sun anytime we are in sunlight. They can see the flares coming from the sun very clearly, which creates a much closer relationship between the astronauts and the sun, than it would be the case on Earth. The real trick is to understand how a solar flare appears. We got from birth to the mid-life of a flare, but the precision of the instruments wasn't enough to see the details of how it really happened.
The agency used work on Skylab by Gibson and others to help advance the field of solar flare prediction and make way for spacecraft such as the Parker Solar Probe, which is currently studying our star closely.
Gibson said, while the purpose of the orbital facility was scientific in nature, e still had a lot of fun while on board the station, including the food, the food was excellent, we ate fish fillet, it was very good, and we all liked the butter cakes. But we had a limited amount of it.