With citizen-scientist astronaut candidates from 46 different countries, Project PoSSUM is the leading citizen-science program conducting astronautics-related research. Watch the PoSSUM team in action high in the northern Canadian skies, doing all sorts of novel research in microgravity, studying human performance in emergency scenarios, and testing EVA space suits at the lunar yard at the Canadian Space Agency headquarters!

Nothing compares to zero gravity. When the unique force that pulls you back to Earth cancels out, you enter a whole new world, a weightless one. All the organs and tissues of your body struggle to understand what is happening, while you can’t but feel insatiably curious and euphoric. Now imagine yourself wearing a spacesuit in these conditions. It’s like a real sub-orbital mission leaving the Earth, but you wouldn’t want to go unprepared! While the atmospheric pressure drops and the air gets dangerously thinner inside the cabin of your ascending sub-orbital spaceship, you need to be able to breathe, move, think, communicate and work in a confined space, all at once!

Thirteen Project PoSSUM scientist-astronaut candidates representing several different countries traveled in June 2017 to High Level in northern Alberta, Canada as part of an international citizen-science team that will study extremely high and elusive ‘space clouds’ called noctilucent clouds. Their goal was to study the clouds that form at altitudes of 83 kilometers in the polar mesosphere from a Mooney M20K research aircraft that is specially equipped with scientific camera systems designed to image the clouds.

The Project PoSSUM (‘Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere’) Space Program shows citizen-science candidates prepare to study elusive ‘space clouds’ from commercial spacecraft that can reveal clues about our changing global climate.