French astronaut Thomas Pesquet - on a second trip to the International Space Station (ISS) - tweeted breathtakingly beautiful pictures of a bird's eye view of a mammoth sand storm that swept across parts of Middle East Asia.
"A sandstorm! I had never seen one from space, this one looked massive… I wonder how many tonnes of sand just flew over dozens or hundreds of kilometres. Mother nature has some strength. #MissionAlpha" Pesquet wrote on his Twitter post.
"A sandstorm! I have seen a few times sand deposited on cars in the streets of metropolitan France, the result of such a weather event, and I knew as a pilot flying to Africa that it could be bad sometimes, but I had never seen one from space! This one looked massive… I wonder how many tons of sand just flew over dozens or hundreds of kilometres. Mother nature has some strength", he wrote on his Flicker post.
The photographs he has shared also include the space walks that the astronauts onboard the ISS have undertaken. Another one shows his fellow astronaut Akihito checking life-saving equipment. "Aki checking emergency equipment: I know them well, because they are the same masks for the pilots in commercial airplanes. Happy to say thought that I have never used them except for this kind of equipment checking! In space and in all extreme situations we check life-saving equipment regularly, but hope never to use them!," posts Pesquet on Flickr.
According to a report, Pesquet was part of Expedition 50 and Expedition 51 as a flight engineer on board the ISS earlier, from November 2016 to June 2017. Thomas Pesquet returned to space in April 2021 onboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon for a second six-month stay on the ISS.
