The week finished with more work on metal casting, a full day of Myotones, more spacewalk preparations, medical drills and, on Wednesday, Thomas set up the new French Pilote experiment and did the first session that will evaluate a new way of providing tactile and visual feedback to astronauts when operating robots. A virtual reality headset and a haptic joystick could recreate the feeling of pressure and touch when tele-operating a robotic arm. The results from Pilote will improve the workspace on the Space Station and future spacecraft for lunar and martian missions, where astronauts in orbit could operate rovers on the surface.

This monthly overview focused only on Thomas’s activities and does not mention the daily planning conferences and the two hours of daily exercise, cleaning duties and more, alongside sharing space with six other astronauts on the Space Station. Of course, many experiments run automatically in the background, meaning the science literally never stops in space.