Local Professor and Astronaut Twitters Pre-Launch Activities

Rice University's own Mike Massimino, a Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science professor, is preparing to take his second spaceflight to the Hubble Space Telescope on May 12, and he's got a lot to say about it. Known on Twitter as Astro_Mike, he began chronicling his preparations earlier this month. The details surrounding the training for a spaceflight are quite a compelling subject, as so far Astro_Mike has over 50,000 followers and counting. That's about 5 times as many followers as the Mars Rovers, and they're on another planet.

If you follow Astro_Mike, you know that astronauts really do practice their spacewalks in a big swimming pool, and that they get their noses swabbed by doctors to make sure they don't have any bad bacteria up there.

We can only hope that Astro_Mike will tweet during one of his spacewalks, but we're pretty sure that space gloves aren't intended for Blackberry usage. If an incomprehensible tweet like "thr eargh is lpbely frpm up hrre" pops up on his twitter stream then we'll know at least he tried.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user TopTechWriter.US