NY native leads latest NASA trip to International Space Station

A native New Yorker and NASA astronaut was among the SpaceX crew members who docked at the International Space Station on Sunday.

The weekend space trip was the first for Long Island native Jasmin Moghbeli. As the trip’s mission commander, Moghbeli “is responsible for all phases of the flight, from launch to re-entry,” NASA said on Sunday.

The SpaceX Crew-7 mission to the ISS – a multi-national lab nearly 300 miles from the planet and situated in Earth’s lower orbit – launched at 3:27 a.m. on Saturday. NASA announced the following day that its crew successfully docked at the site on Sunday at 8:39 a.m., according to a release from the agency.

NASA selected Moghbeli as an astronaut just six years earlier, in 2017. Moghbeli — who studied at M.I.T., in Cambridge, and the Naval Postgraduate School, in California, also worked as a helicopter and Marine Corps test pilot.

The crew is tasked with conducting research that’ll help with human explorations beyond Earth’s lower orbit in the future. This includes studying the psychological aspects of the astronauts’ sleep schedules, collecting microbial samples and studying the human response of different space flight interactions, NASA said.

“Four crew members from 4 different nations, representing 4 space agencies, working together,” Moghbeli posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, less than a week before the launch.

She added that she felt “so proud and honored to be a part of this team.”