Romanian cosmonaut Dumitru Prunariu is holding today a public conference on the cosmic habitat at the Dalles Hall in Bucharest.
"The Dalles Cultural Foundation of the Romanian Academy invites the public to the conference 'Human Expansion in Outer Space. Habitat and living conditions', to be held by Dumitru-Dorin Prunariu, an honorary member of the Romanian Academy, the first and only Romanian cosmonaut to fly into outer space," according to the Romanian Academy.
The conference provides insight into the complex realm of space and cosmic conditions as determined by experiments and tests aboard inhabited space stations.
In his presentation, Prunariu will provide details about the habitat in which the cosmic crews have lived for months, represented by the orbital stations, and will describe some of the equipment that generates and maintains the living conditions as close as possible to the terrestrial ones. He will also talk about the numerous changes that occur in the functioning of the astronauts' human body in microgravity conditions, as well as about a wide range of medical problems that can occur, for the prevention of which precise measures are required.
"The conference will highlight how the lessons learned over several decades can be applied, using the experience of the Apollo lunar program, and also the activities aboard the International Space Station and the Chinese Tiangong Space Station. Lately, numerous hypotheses have been put forth about a possible extraterrestrial future of a part of humanity, but the cosmic factors and the specifics of interplanetary spaces must be investigated very thoroughly even if the next targets of the piloted flights could be the Moon and the planet Mars, so much researched by explorers."
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Dumitru Prunariu is the first Romanian astronaut and the world's 103rd to fly into outer space. In 1981 he participated, under the international programme Intercosmos, in an eight-day space flight aboard a Soyuz-40 spacecraft and the Salyut-6 space station.
He is one of the founding members of the Association of Space Explorers (ASE), founded in 1985. Since 1992 he has represented the Government of Romania at the sessions of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Exploration of Outer Space (COPUOS), being chairman of the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of COPUOS (2004-2006) and chairman of the committee (2010-2012). From 1998 to 2004 he was the president of the Romanian Space Agency.
In recognition of his merits in the international promotion of the study of asteroids with potential impact on the Earth and for his involvement in the activity of several organisations and research projects, the International Astronomical Union decided in 2017 that the name of Prunariu be given to an asteroid in the main belt of the Solar System, the asteroid "10.707 Prunariu."