ISS astronauts welcome 2022 with orbital badminton game aboard space station; WATCH

The New Year has arrived in every corner of the world by now with the International Space Station being no exception. On this occasion, astronaut Matthias Maurer has sent his best regards to the Earthlings while recalling his orbital badminton match that he had aboard the ISS with a visitor, Yusaku Maezawa. Taking to Twitter, Maurer shared a 360 degrees glimpse of his game through a video shared by the European Space Agency (ESA).

"Happy New Year! Wishing you all a happy & healthy 2022! Aboard the @Space_Station, we're also looking forward to a new year full of science, new experiments & hopefully more fun crew activities, like our orbital badminton match," Maurer wrote in his tweet. Maurer revealed that the clip is dated December 2021, when Maezawa had visited the space station along with his assistant Yozo Hirano and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin for a 12-day stay. In the funny video, Maezawa can be seen teamed up with Misurkin while Maurer was seen trading shots alongside Maezawa's assistant and video producer Hirano.

Maezawa, who had his first-ever space trip, surely made the most out of it as he conducted a gamut of activities ranging from arm-wrestling to skipping ropes in micro-gravity of the ISS. Earlier on Friday, the billionaire entrepreneur shared a video of him playing golf aboard the space station. In the video shown below, the billionaire introduced the viewers to what he called the International Space Station Club which had a golf course in a crammed module filled with equipment. 

Maurer and his amusing posts

The German-born astronaut keeps his followers fairly amused with his posts as he keeps sharing glimpses of the everyday lives of the ISS astronauts. In December 2021, Maurer had shared a clip of himself getting a haircut in the space station, a post that wowed the netizens. Taking to Twitter, Maurer praised NASA astronaut Raja Chari who was handling the special clippers was assigned the job to trim Maurer's hair.

Through his recent post, Maurer also introduced the people of Earth to a common routine aboard the space station that the astronauts are bound to follow for two hours. The astronaut shared a video of himself exercising in micro-gravity, an activity that is extremely essential to maintain muscle mass and bone density. 

Image: Twitter/@astro_matthias