Emirati astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi has posted a picture taken from the International Space Station, showing a commercial plane flying over marshland in Iraq.
Mr Al Neyadi says the ISS is orbiting the Earth at an altitude 40 times higher than the plane, which appears in the picture as a speck with a vapour trail.
The image also shows an area of relatively isolated Hawr Al Dalmaj marshland, a spot popular with tourists and one of Iraq’s endangered wetlands that thrives with migratory birdlife.
“I took this photo with a 400mm camera lens as a plane passed over Iraq,” Mr Al Neyadi said in a tweet. "Commercial planes typically fly about 10km above the Earth's surface, while the ISS is 40 times higher.
Mr Al Neyadi is weeks away from returning to Earth, currently on the ISS’s Expedition 69, with space station commander Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos, Nasa astronauts Stephen Bowen, Woody Hoburg and Frank Rubio, and cosmonauts Andrey Fedyaev and Dmitri Petelin.
On Saturday, he tweeted about one of his duties on the ISS, saying how he helped with vital life support tasks for the crew, changing filters “to keep our air safe and clean”.
“Breathing fresh and clean air on Earth is quite easy and uncomplicated,” he said.
“However, aboard the ISS, things are not that simple. We require devices such as air filters to obtain pure air.”
Mr Al Neyadi, who arrived on the ISS on March 3, was the first Arab to perform a spacewalk when he carried out maintenance work in April, in a seven-hour operation alongside Mr Bowen.
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What is blockchain?
Blockchain is a form of distributed ledger technology, a digital system in which data is recorded across multiple places at the same time. Unlike traditional databases, DLTs have no central administrator or centralised data storage. They are transparent because the data is visible and, because they are automatically replicated and impossible to be tampered with, they are secure.
The main difference between blockchain and other forms of DLT is the way data is stored as ‘blocks’ – new transactions are added to the existing ‘chain’ of past transactions, hence the name ‘blockchain’. It is impossible to delete or modify information on the chain due to the replication of blocks across various locations.
Blockchain is mostly associated with cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Due to the inability to tamper with transactions, advocates say this makes the currency more secure and safer than traditional systems. It is maintained by a network of people referred to as ‘miners’, who receive rewards for solving complex mathematical equations that enable transactions to go through.
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