"It's much better than I dreamed of." The beautiful story of Samantha Cristoforetti, the first Italian astronaut to reach – tonight just before 4 am Italian time – the International Space Station, where she will stay for six months, is not the only one to do Italy credit.
Cristoforetti, which left yesterday at 22.01 pm from Baikonur station, in Kazakhstan (from where, excited, she launched the last terrestrial tweet: "We hear from space!"), brings with her several made in Italy pieces. First of all the inevitable coffee: "We were welcomed by a big party on board, there's a good meal, we haven't eaten for a long time", said the 37-year-old Milanese as soon as she landed at the ISS station, where she will also find a machine in a few months of all-Italian coffee, the result of the collaboration between Argotec, Lavazza and Finmeccanica-Selex Es.
Even the 3D printer on board is all Italian: built by Altran and Thales Alenia Space, it is a 25 cubic cm box, with low energy consumption and made of biodegradable plastic materials. That's not all: a series of researches started or to be started on board, signed by universities or research institutes of the boot, are also branded Italy. The "Drai Brain" experiment is one of these: coordinated by the doctor Paolo Zamboni, of the Center for vascular diseases of the University of Ferrara, it must verify the hypothesis according to which one of the causes of multiple sclerosis could be the narrowing of the vessels head and neck blood vessels.
Then wearable monitoring: a T-shirt equipped with sensors capable of measuring heart and breathing rhythms during sleep, and the portable electronic unit to collect the data. And again: surveys on the behavior of fluids, bacterial decontamination techniques, tests on how cells develop in weightlessness and on the loss of muscle mass, and even a study on how to use nanoparticles to fight osteoporosis (this the latter is studied by the University of Pavia). The Slink project of the Milan Polytechnic will also be developed in space, which will precisely concern the adaptation of the human brain away from the Earth.
