French astronaut Sophie Adenot is ready to fly to the International Space Station on Friday, 13 February 2026. She will launch at round 11:00 CET from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida as a part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-12 mission. The launch was attributable to happen at present, Thursday, however was postponed due to unhealthy climate. They are attributable to dock with ISS on Saturday night.
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The crew will launch aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft on a Falcon 9 rocket. Adenot will likely be joined by NASA astronauts Jessica Meir (mission commander), Jack Hathaway (pilot), and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev (mission specialist).
Who is Sophie Adenot, the French engineer destined for space?
Adenot, 43, holds the rank of colonel in the French Air and Space Force. She will grow to be solely the second Frenchwoman in space in greater than 30 years, following Claudie Haigneré’s historic missions in the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s.
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Haigneré first flew to space in August 1996 aboard Soyuz TM-24, spending 16 days on the Russian space station Mir through the Cassiopée mission. In October 2001, she turned the primary European woman to go to the International Space Station through the Andromède mission.
The Crew-12 mission will likely be Adenot’s first spaceflight. The European Space Agency has named her mission εpsilon (Epsilon). Selected as an ESA astronaut in November 2022 from a pool of twenty-two,500 candidates, she turned the primary member of her class to obtain a flight task.
Adenot earned an engineering diploma from ISAE-SUPAERO in Toulouse, France, specialising in spacecraft and plane flight dynamics. She additionally holds a grasp’s diploma in human components engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.
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Before becoming a member of ESA, she turned France’s first feminine helicopter take a look at pilot in 2018, accumulating over 3,000 flight hours on 22 various kinds of helicopter.
Adenot’s experiments
Josef Aschbacher, Director General of the European Space Agency, stated Adenot’s mission was essential for Europe as she could be conducting experiments throughout her six-to-eight-month keep on the International Space Station.
The goal is to develop science and expertise via her experiments. This varieties an important a part of human exploration work is vital for growing experience in space, Aschbacher informed RFI English following the ESA Director General’s annual press briefing in January.
According to CNES, France‘s space company, Adenot will contribute to roughly 200 experiments throughout her keep. Seven have been particularly ready for the Epsilon mission by CADMOS, CNES’s centre for the event of microgravity functions and space operations in Toulouse.
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The experiments will concentrate on physiology, expertise testing for future Moon and Mars missions, and academic outreach.
The mission identify, εpsilon, displays the fifth Greek letter and follows the French custom of naming human spaceflight missions after celestial our bodies.
Epsilon can also be the fifth brightest star in the Leo constellation. The identify symbolises the ability of small but impactful contributions in space exploration, with every workforce member taking part in a significant function in the collaborative worldwide effort.