Space to Ground: In The Holiday Spirit: Dec. 15, 2023

NASA's Space to Ground is your weekly update on what's happening aboard the International Space Station.

What is said in the film

Welcome to space to ground, I’m chelsey ballarte. The holiday season is in full swing here on earth, and up in space, the festivities have already started aboard the international space station. The spacex cargo dragon spacecraft delivered some holiday food about a month ago chocolate, turkey, cranberry sauce. But this week, that spacecraft is coming home, delivering science experiments back to their researchers. The spacex cargo dragon spacecraft will undock from the space station and make its way back to earth.

And researchers will get to see their experimnets home for the holidays. One returning experiment, plant habitat-03, looks at whether genetic adaptations in one generation of plants grown in space can transfer to the next. Studying these changes could help us learn how to grow repeated generations of crops to provide food for future space missions. So we know the astronauts received some holiday food aboard the space station, but how else do they celebrate in space? Nasa astronaut jasmin moghbeli gave us a sneak peak of how she marked the first day of hanukkah in the station cupola.

“happy hanukah, from the international space station she said that real candles are definitely not allowed aboard the space station. So instead, she improvised with a hand made mennorah and a spinning dreidel. Cookie decorating is another popular holiday past time on the space station. In december of 2021, nasa astronauts frosted their cookies with candy canes, santas, and the nasa logo, but crews in the past have made other decorative objects, and even the entire earth out of their cookies. We’ll have to keep a close eye on this crew’s social media to see if they decorated too.

European space agency astronaut andy mogensen saw something red in the sky and got photo. And no, it wasn’t santa claus. It’s obviously too early in december for that. But he did see a red sprite known as a transient luminous event. Red sprites form above thunder clouds on earth.

Because they’re so high up on a cloudy day, it’s rare to see them from the ground, but andreas had the perfect vantage point from space. This was part of the thor-davis experiment that investigates lightning in the upper atmosphere and how it might affect the concentration of greenhouse gasses. Next week on space to ground, some of the hosts of the show will get together for the final episode of the year. We’ll take a look back at some of the year’s highlights and reflect on some of our favorite moments. We’ll see you then

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