Who is Jessica Watkins: The first Black woman for a long duration mission, Astronaut Jessica Watkins has been roped in as a mission specialist on NASA's upcoming project, SpaceX Crew-4. With this project, NASA and SpaceX, which is owned by Elon Musk will be launching four more astronauts to the International Space Station.
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The crew members will include NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren and Robert Hines as well as European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had previously announced Cristoforetti as the mission specialist in May.
A mission specialist astronaut is supposed to work closely with the commander and pilot. Plus, they are responsible for coordinating board operations like crew activity planning etc.
Space X Crew-4 is scheduled for a launch in April 2022 from NASA's Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
Jessica Watkins will be the first black woman to Join NASA's Commercial Crew Programme for a long-duration mission. Mae Jemison was the first Black woman to travel to space in 1992 on an STS-47 mission that lasted for eight days.
Who is Jessica Watkins?
This will be Watkins first trip to space after she was selected as an astronaut in 2017. Born in Gaithersburg in Maryland, the United States, Watkins considers Lafayette in Colorado as her hometown.
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She has a bachelor's degree in geological and environmental sciences from Stanford Univerity and a doctorate in geology from the University of California in Los Angeles.
Her graduate research was on the "emplacement mechanisms of large landslides on Earth and Mars." Before getting acceptance as an astronaut, she worked as an intern at NASA and then went on to work at Ames Research Center in California and Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA in South California.
When she was accepted as an astronaut, she was pursuing her postdoctoral degree in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology.
Watkins enjoys rugby, basketball, soccer, skiing, coaching, movies as well as writing.
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