Beaming President and Vice-President, proud Crown Princes, ministers and top officials, hundreds of children cheered and chanted AlNeyadi's name
Those who closely followed Sultan AlNeyadi’s spacewalk on Friday were also treated to a vicarious space adventure as they saw stunning shots of orbital sunrises and sunsets taken from the spacewalking astronauts’ Helca (helmet camera).
The International Space Station (ISS) orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes, and AlNeyadi and Bowen were able to experience a sunrise and a sunset every 45 minutes during their almost seven-hour spacewalk.
The public saw how astronauts worked in sunlight for 45 minutes, and in stark darkness with lights coming only from their helmets. The temperatures also varied from freezing cold minus 121ºC to extreme heat at 121ºC in the sunlight — which was almost three times the temperature during summer in the UAE. They saw how astronauts were protected by spacesuits that were designed like a miniature spaceship (shaped in human body).
AlNeyadi, together with Hazzaa AlMansoori, trained at Nasa's Johnson Space Centre’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory (NBL) in Houston for months to get familiar with microgravity and execute this historic spacewalk — the first for the Arab world.
Take a look at some of the stunning shots in the sky:
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Beaming President and Vice-President, proud Crown Princes, ministers and top officials, hundreds of children cheered and chanted AlNeyadi's name
The astronaut said he lived his childhood dream of going to space and seeing the Milky Way
The father of six said that he had taken some of their toys to space and he was looking forward to returning those to them
After landing at Abu Dhabi International Airport, AlNeyadi says he would love to go to the moon and to Mars, if possible
Landing in the UAE after his historic space mission, AlNeyadi joined in for the traditional Al Ayyala dance
The astronaut gifted the national flag he took to space to Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed
The image shows swirling solar activities in shades of orange and yellow with a large jet of orange and red from the bottom left of the image
The UAE President, Vice-President received the astronaut at the new Abu Dhabi International Airport