Today is National Teacher Day! NASA astronaut Ricky Arnold was a science teacher at John Hanson Middle School in Waldorf, Maryland, and had teaching gigs in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Indonesia and Romania all before becoming an astronaut. He is also a marine biologist who, upon receiving his master’s degree, spent a year working in the Marine Sciences including time at the Cape Cod National Seashore and aboard a sail training/oceanographic vessel headquartered in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
In this image, Arnold answers questions from the audience about his time onboard the International Space Station during a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum production of STEM in 30, Friday, May 3, 2019, at Six Flags America theme park in Maryland. During his time on the station, Arnold completed three spacewalks for a total of 19.5 hours outside the space station, and concluded his 197-day mission when he landed aboard a Soyuz spacecraft near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan in October 2018. He also flew to the space station on shuttle mission STS-119 to deliver the final pair of power-generating solar array wings.
Image Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani