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A qualified professional engineer, pilot and an advanced diver, Nespoli served in the Italian army between 1977 and 1984 \u2013 becoming qualified as master parachutist, parachutist instructor and special forces operator.<\/p>\n
Nespoli left the army to complete his studies and work as a design engineer in Florence, where he conducted mechanical analysis and provided support for qualification of the flight units of the electron gun assembly, one of the main components of the Italian space agency\u2019s Tethered Satellite System.<\/p>\n
He joined ESA\u2019s European Astronaut Centre in Cologne as an astronaut training engineer. In 1995, he was part of the EuroMir project at the Agency\u2019s ESTEC establishment in Noordwijk in the Netherlands, where he was responsible for the team that prepared, integrated and supported the payload and crew support computer used on the Russian space station Mir.<\/p>\n
![\"2015-07-30-140616\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/2015-07-30-140616-350x296.jpg\")
The following year he relocated to NASA\u2019s Johnson Space Center where he worked in the Spaceflight Training Division. In 1998 he was selected to be an astronaut by the Italian space agency, joining ESA\u2019s European Astronaut Corps.<\/p>\nReturning to JSC, Nespoli was assigned to the XVIIth NASA Astronaut class, training on Shuttle, Station and EVA tasks.<\/p>\n
NASA mission patches
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His first space flight came during his two-week Esperia mission on Shuttle Discovery\u2019s STS-120 in 2007. One of his main tasks was to help install the Node-2 module on the Space Station \u2013 aided by his robotic arm training at JSC.<\/p>\n
![\"2015-07-30-141343\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/2015-07-30-141343-350x246.jpg\")
He returned to the Station in 2010 for ESA\u2019s 160-day MagISStra mission as part of Expeditions 26 and 27.<\/p>\nDuring his time on Station he welcomed ESA\u2019s second Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) during its docking to the ISS.<\/p>\n
Nespoli got to see the vehicle from outside of the confines of the Station when he completed his mission, although the photographs he took will be mainly remembered for the iconic views of Shuttle Endeavour docked to the ISS during her STS-134 mission.<\/p>\n
This historic event was many months in the planning and was originally set to take place during STS-133.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/A86.jpg\" "\\"A8\\"")
With a vast amount of evaluations clearing the concerns relating to the event, the Soyuz TMA-20 crew \u2013 comprised of Soyuz commander Dimitri Kondratyev of Russia, and flight engineers Cady Coleman of the US and Nespoli \u2013 suited up, conducted leak checks, and enter their Soyuz capsule per nominal procedures.<\/p>\nAbout 40 minutes prior to the Soyuz undocking, the ISS performed a 90 degree pitch-up manoeuvre from its standard Shuttle docked attitude, -XVV (negative X axis in Velocity Vector), to the Soyuz undocking attitude , -ZVV (negative Z axis in Velocity Vector) under the control of Russian Segment (RS) thrusters.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/A141.jpg\" "\\"A14\\"")
Once the undocking attitude was achieved, the ISS entered a period of free drift and Soyuz TMA-20 undocked from the ISS.<\/p>\nCommander Kondratyev then began to manually fly the Soyuz away from the ISS, and the Russian thrusters resumed attitude control of the station.<\/p>\n
Once the Soyuz had reached 200 meters distance from the Station \u2013 around 10 minutes after undocking \u2013 Kondratyev held Soyuz\u2019s position and Nespoli opened the hatch between the Descent Module \u2013 where the crew were seated for the undocking \u2013 and the Orbital Module.<\/p>\n
![\"2015-07-30-140058\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/2015-07-30-140058-350x280.jpg\")
After about eight minutes of set-up procedures, Nespoli began to take the imagery of the Shuttle\/ISS stack using a High Definition video camcorder and a High Resolution digital camera.<\/p>\nFive minutes later \u2013 and with the Soyuz positioned slightly above the ISS due to the need to keep the Sun out of Kondratyev\u2019s eyes \u2013 the ISS began a 15 minute, 129 degree manoeuvre (at 0.2 degrees per second) which placed the ISS in the +YVV (plus Y axis in Velocity Vector) attitude, at a 90 degree side-on angle to the Soyuz.<\/p>\n
Nespoli was filming and photographing the manoeuvre throughout this period, and also occasionally used a handheld laser range finder to assist Kondratyev with his manual station keeping.<\/p>\n
![\"2015-07-30-135950\"](\"https:\/\/www.nasaspaceflight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/07\/2015-07-30-135950-350x254.jpg\")
This was the first time that a Soyuz had \u201cstation kept\u201d with the ISS at 200 meters \u2013 and also during a period that the ISS had changed attitude.<\/p>\nNespoli continued to image the station for about 10 minutes after the manoeuvre was completed, whereupon Kondratyev conducted a final separation burn to take the Soyuz away from the station.<\/p>\n
The crew successfully landed hours later.<\/p>\n
Following this second flight to the ISS, Nespoli worked at ESA\u2019s ESRIN centre in Italy and at the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne.<\/p>\n
Assigned to his third mission to the ISS, the Italian has now started training at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre near Moscow.<\/p>\n
The new mission is part of a barter agreement between NASA and Italy\u2019s ASI space agency involving ESA astronauts. It will be ASI\u2019s third long-duration flight, following Luca Parmitano\u2019s Volare in 2013 and Samantha Cristoforetti\u2019s Futura this year.<\/p>\n
(Images via ESA and NASA).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced Paolo Nespoli is to return to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2017. The veteran Italian astronaut will be making his third trip to the orbital outpost, following missions in 2007 and 2010 \u2013 the latter concluding with stunning and unique photography of Shuttle Endeavour docked to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30098,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[246,233,1302],"class_list":["post-39280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-esa","tag-iss","tag-soyuz"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39280"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}