Rayana Barnawi will also be the first Arab to visit the International Space Station.
Rayana Barnawi will become this Sunday the first Saudi female astronaut to travel to space and will also be the first Arab to visit the International Space Station (ISS) as a member of the mission with which Saudi Arabia debuts in the space race.
Barnawi and Ali al Qarni, also a Saudi astronaut, are part of the private mission Ax-2, which will take off today at 21:37 GMT from the platform of the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida (USA), together with their teammates, former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, who is leading the project, and American pilot John Shoffner.
Born in September 1988 in the Saudi city of Jeddah, this young astronaut studied a Master’s degree in Biomedical Sciences at Al Faisal University in Saudi Arabia after completing a degree in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Otago (New Zealand), publishes Axiom Space as a profile of Barnawi.
A biomedical researcher with nearly a decade of experience in cancer stem cell research, Barnawi will work to facilitate Saudi Arabian scientific research aboard Axiom Space’s second private mission, where she will focus her focus on cancer and stem cell research. of breast.
“This mission includes carrying out 14 pioneering experiments in a microgravity environment, which will contribute to providing answers about health research in that environment,” the Saudi Space Authority said in a statement published by the kingdom’s official news agency, SPA. .
As with the first Axiom Space mission, the Ax-2 will travel aboard a Dragon capsule, which will be propelled by a Falcon 9 rocket, both from the private firm SpaceX.
The Ax-2 represents a step forward for the company towards the goal they have of building a commercial space station in low Earth orbit, where the ISS moves, and thus take advantage of “the benefits of microgravity to improve life on earth”.
Axiom Space’s first private mission, Ax-1, was launched on April 8, 2022 with four private crew members who spent 17 days on the space station conducting science outreach and educational tasks.
EFE