On the occasion of the Italian National Day of Space, ESA astronaut Paolo Nespoli shares his career highlights and the lessons learned from the perspective of his 3 flights in space for a total of 313 days in orbit. With the participation of CERN engineer Slawosz Uznanski, who has just been recruited in the 2022 class of the European Astronaut Corps.

Join the audience in CERN's main auditorium on 16 December at 11 a.m.. Organisation and Moderation: Paola Catapano, IR-ECO-ECP, with the support of the Italian Embassy in Bern, of the Italian General Consulates in Geneva and Zurich, and with the collaboration of the CERN Library.

Paolo Nespoli
Major Paolo Angelo Nespoli (born 6 April 1957) is an Italian astronaut and engineer (ret.) at the European Space Agency (ESA). He was selected in 1998 and he first traveled to space on the Space Shuttle Discovery STS-120, a mission dedicated to the construction of the International Space Station (ISS). Then, in 2010 and 2011, he traveled to the ISS aboard the Soyuz TMA-20 for Expedition 26/27. Nespoli's third spaceflight started with Soyuz MS-05, which launched in July 2017 for Expedition 52/53. He spent a total of 313 days in orbit.

Slawosz Uznanski
CERN staff member Slawosz Uznanski, reliability engineer of the LHC new power converters in the Accelerator Systems department (SY), was selected in November to be in the reserve pool of the new class of ESA astronauts. Slawosz, who has held a passion for space and exploration since his early childhood, has successfully passed all the stages of a year-long extremely competitive selection process, which started in summer 2021 with more than 22 500 applicants from ESA Member and Associate Member States. This was the first call for new ESA astronaut applicants since 2008.