Australian-born space scientist Andy Thomas was the first Australian astronaut to live in space for months at a time. He joined the Russian space station Mir in January 1998 and returned to earth in June the same year. He was the last of the NASA astronauts to live on Mir. Part of his preparation involved learning Russian to be able to communicate with the others living on the space station. While he was on Mir, he described what it was like looking down on the Earth: ‘Perhaps one of the most sublime of all the cosmic sights I have seen to date is the Aurora Australis over the southern polar regions. Only visible at night, it is an eerie curtain of pale green phosphorescence that waves and twists above the Earth, stretching for hundreds of miles’.