On the left, Josh Cassada and on the right, Commander Nicole Mann.
And here come our second two astronauts, mission specialist Koichi Wakata.
And Ana Kikina.
It's incredible to be in space!
Mom look, I'm finally in space!
It's like coming back to a home away from home for me.
And I cannot wait to work with this wonderful crew on Expedition 68.
It is so important, the science that we're doing on board
the space station, a lot of the science is about our human bodies.
A lot of it is technology demonstrations for a future exploration into space.
But also a lot of what we do on the International Space Station
benefits humans back on Earth and focuses on our planet
and how important it is that we gather this information
and this data to understand how we are affecting the planet
and how to take care of it.
This morning, I was helping set up an experiment for plant growth.
We're going to grow a little dwarf tomatoes up here, and we're trying
all different kinds of varieties of light in terms of color, in terms of duration,
so that eventually we can start growing our own fruits and vegetables up here.
And then we're really going to need that for deep space.
Station is a wonderful testbed for future exploration and I'm so excited to be part
of this experiment that will benefit us for exploration of the Moon and Mars.
Great work down there today.
We're excited to uh to unpack and get to work.
The experiments up here
that I get really excited about because I did physics before I got here.
There's a big one on top of the space station.
It's called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, super cool experiment
that is just collecting cosmic rays from the universe and answering questions
about dark matter and dark energy.
We've got another one that's called the Cold Atom Lab,
where we're looking at something called a Bose-Einstein condensate.
It's the same technology
we have on the ground, but up here you don't have to fight gravity.
And so we can actually see quantum mechanics happen at the macroscopic level.
I'm often asked, what is it we're going to learn?
And I know that if we already know what we're going to find, then
I'll tell you what, there's no reason to be doing the science.
The reason we're doing the science is because we don't know
what we're going to find.
But I know it's going to be awfully, awfully cool.