When the next mission to the International Space Station blasts off from Florida next week, a special keepsake will be hitching a ride: a small stuffed rabbit.
American astronaut and mother, Jessica Meir, one of the four-member crew, revealed Sunday that she'll take with her the cuddly toy that belongs to her three-year-old daughter.
It's customary for astronauts to go to the ISS, which orbits 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth, to take small personal items to keep close during their months-long stint in space.
"I do have a small stuffed rabbit that belongs to my three-year-old daughter, and she actually has two of these because one was given as a gift," Meir, 48, told an online news conference.
"So one will stay down here with her, and one will be there with us, having adventures all the time, so that we'll keep sending those photos back and forth to my family," AFP quoted her as saying.
US space agency NASA says SpaceX Crew-12 will lift off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida to the orbiting scientific laboratory early Wednesday.
The mission will be replacing Crew-11, which returned to Earth in January, a month earlier than planned, during the first medical evacuation in the space station's history.
Meir, a marine biologist and physiologist, served as flight engineer on a 2019-2020 expedition to the space station and participated in the first all-female spacewalks.
Since then, she's given birth to her daughter. She reflected Sunday on the challenges of being a parent and what is due to be an eight-month separation from her child.
"It does make it a lot difficult in preparing to leave and thinking about being away from her for that long, especially when she's so young, it's really a large chunk of her life," Meir said.
"But I hope that one day, she will really realize that this absence was a meaningful one, because it was an adventure that she got to share into and that she'll have memories about, and hopefully it will inspire her and other people around the world," Meir added.
When the astronauts finally get on board the ISS, they will be one of the last crews to live on board the football field-sized space station.
Continuously inhabited for the last quarter century, the aging ISS is scheduled to be pushed into Earth's orbit before crashing into an isolated spot in the Pacific Ocean in 2030.
The other Crew-12 astronauts are Jack Hathaway of NASA, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
