Welcome home, Andreas

After more than six months on the International Space Station, including five as the commander, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen is back in Denmark. The homecoming tour for his Huginn mission started at the Experimentarium science museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, where the public, press, and special guests were invited to celebrate Andreas’s return.

A local choir welcomed Andreas with the Danish song ‘Lyse Nætter’, or Bright Nights, whose lyrics say “You are back with me”. Next, they paid homage to his trip to the International Space Station with Elton John’s song ‘Rocket Man’.

Together with Andreas at the event were ESA’s Director General Josef Aschbacher, ESA’s director of Human and Robotic Exploration Daniel Neuenschwander, and the Danish Minister of Higher Education and Science Christina Egelund. Other guests included scientists in charge of the experiments Andreas conducted during his Huginn mission and teams from a national educational project around his mission called ‘Rumrejsen’, or Space Journey in English.

Andreas will continue his homecoming tour next week, after which he will return to ESA’s European Astronaut Centre in Cologne, Germany. Andreas spent the last nine years in the USA as ESA astronaut liaison officer to NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, supporting spacewalks and operations for several missions on the International Space Station as a capcom – the only person allowed to speak directly to the astronauts in space.

You can learn more about the Huginn mission and the science Andreas performed on the Huginn website.