From Building 9 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, USA, ESA TV host Dominique Detain interviews ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano on training for his Beyond mission to the International Space Station.

Beyond will be Luca’s second mission to the Space Station. During the second part of his mission, known as Expedition 61, he will take on the role of Space Station Commander becoming the third European astronaut ever to do so.

As part of his training, Luca is preparing to repair the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer AMS-02 particle detector. The dark-matter hunter was launched 16 May 2011 on Space Shuttle Endeavour mission STS-134. It records over 17 billion cosmic rays, particles, and nuclei a year. The results from AMS-02 have shown unexpected phenomena not predicted by cosmic ray models and changed our understanding of the cosmos.

Luca will go beyond Earth’s atmosphere when he returns to the International Space Station in 2019 as part of Expedition 60/61, alongside NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan and Roscosmos astronaut Alexander Skvortsov.