The astronaut who has been tweeting pictures of the Earth from space is set to return to land this week, marking the end of an extraordinary gallery that has included pictures of the Space Shuttle Atlantis as well as a host of images of the Earth itself.
Soichi Noguchi, a Japanese astronaut currently staying on the International Space Station, first began using the twitpic service when Nasa introduced a new way for crew-members to access the web from space. Previously, astronauts had been using services such as Twitter by emailing messages to mission control and then having somebody repost them to the site manually.
Since the new connection was installed, however, the flight engineer has uploaded more than 600 photographs of areas around the globe, as well as pictures of the station and shuttle. Recently these have included images of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Moscow by night, the Moon, his colleagues and Mount Ararat as well as more artistic images.
Earlier this year, Nasa also held a live Q&A with astronauts answering questions about their life orbiting the Earth. It is likely that other astronauts will continue to Twitter from the space station, however – Astro_Soichi currently has over 244,000 followers.
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