Having a pen pal just reached a new altitude, thanks to Friendsinspace.org, an online app that allows you to say hello to Samantha Cristoforetti, a European Space Agency astronaut, while she is in the International Space Station.
With a surge of interest in space exploration resulting from movies like Interstellar and the real-life Rosetta comet rendezvous, the app, created by an Italian design studio in collaboration with social network-conscious Cristoforetti, could not have better timing.
Sign in through your social networking app of choice and you are presented with a home page that shows Cristoforetti's current position. If you are on her orbit path you can say "hello" (the closer you are to the flight path the ''louder" your ''hello") and if you're lucky she will say ''hello" back.
You can also say hello and tweet to other "friends in space" tracking the ISS's orbit online, watch the space station's 15 orbits a day in real time and see the past and future trajectories of the orbit. Plus watch a live HD video feed of Earth, with the occasional bonus of hearing Cristoforetti and the crews' conversations about the daily life of an astronaut in space.
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