São Paulo – This Wednesday (10), Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro received the Emirati student Alia Al Mansoori, at Palácio do Planalto in Brasília. The sixteen-year-old won the 2017 contest “Genes in Space” sponsored by Boeing, the UAE Space Agency and the Abu Dhabi newspaper The National. The contest encourages middle- and high-school students to create experiments on the effects of the space on DNA.
According to information from the Emirates News Agency (WAM), Mansoori’s experiment studied how gene expression changes induced by stress, such as by cosmic radiation and microgravity, can be detected in space.
Her experiment was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in August 2017 aboard a Dragon capsule driven by a Space X Falcon 9 rocket as part of a refueling mission bound to the International Space Station. At the station, the experiment was performed by the NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson and was successful, according to WAM.
The student wants to be an astronaut and her dream is to become the first Emirati woman to go to Mars.
The encounter with the Brazilian president was accompanied by the senators Flávio Bolsonaro (PSL-RJ) and Eduardo Gomes (MDB-GO). In the picture, Alia Al Mansoori takes a selfie with the president and his son Flávio (right).
Translated by Guilherme Miranda
