For Toms River students like Lucas Lowery, speaking with astronauts aboard the International Space Station was an incredible experience.
“It was something I’ve seen other people do, and I wanted to do for myself,” he said. “I want to be an aerospace engineer at NASA working on rocket engines and entry, descent and landing, to land and leave Mars.”
Lowery was among the several students in Toms River’s STEAM Academy (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) to participate recently in a 20-minute call with astronauts, where questions were answered in real time. Astronauts Don Pettit and Butch Wilmore fielded a variety of questions, on everything from how astronauts breathe aboard the ISS to how the human body is affected by zero-gravity environments.
“The body does do very many changes,” said Wilmore. “They say, and you can kind of feel it a little bit, that your internal organs shift up into your body a little bit — which is good, because it makes you feel thinner.”
Responding to the question about how astronauts breathe while aboard the space station, Pettit explained the machinery that makes that possible.
“It takes electricity and water, it makes hydrogen and oxygen,” he said. “We breathe the oxygen, and we take the hydrogen and we can combine that with carbon dioxide, and we end up making methane, and recovering some more water from that.”
The chat was part of a regular Q&A session that NASA hosts between astronauts and schools nationwide.