The European Space Agency astronaut from Belfast has just started a new phase in her training, when she will spend six months at Nasa centres in the US.
The training will prepare her for space walks and include learning about the parts of the International Space Station (ISS) and how to repair it.
Ms Coogan has not yet been assigned a mission, but the aim is for her to visit the ISS by 2030.
One of the things she is looking forward to is taking part in the science that happens on board the station.
“An astronaut will, on average, get involved with hundreds of different experiments,” she said. “One of the areas I’m interested in is the human science, or the biological sciences side of things.
“Having an astronaut going into space, of course we’re the hands and eyes in space, but also we have our bodies in microgravity, and that’s a great test bed for looking into lots of medical research.”
Ms Coogan said one of the things to look at is how microgravity affects bone and muscle loss in space, something that is important to understand because of the ageing population on Earth.
“There’s a lot of medical research as well, which I find really interesting. It has this kind of basis in physics,” she said.
“Exploration and inspiration” is a huge part of what space travel is about, she added, saying that as well as seeing “where technology can take us”, experiments in space can help tackle issues on Earth.
“Technology can take us off the Earth, to explore our surroundings, to put us in this bigger picture of where we came from, but I think we look at the International Space Station that really is a laboratory, it’s science,” she said. “And that science is not obscure.
“It’s things that people on Earth want to know about, and the fact you can do it in space is giving those answers. It’s directly relevant to our day-to-day lives, and I think that is sometimes lost.”
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