Friends In Space allows you to say hello to astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti while she’s in space. When her orbit aligns with your location on earth you can click “hello” Accurat

By the time you read this story, Samantha Cristoforetti will be getting used to life aboard the International Space Station. The Italian astronaut (the first female Italian astronaut to make it to the ISS) will be 250 miles above Earth's surface, far beyond our ability to see her with our god-given eyes, but not quite far enough that we can't say hello to her.

To say hello, all you have to do is press the green button. Using Friends In Space, a new web app from Italian design studio <a href="http://www.accurat.it/" target="_blank">Accurat</a>, terrestrial humans can directly communicate with Cristoforetti with the click of a mouse-she just needs to be orbiting your section of Earth. You can do more than that though: The website lets you track her past, current, and future orbits; it visualizes the astronauts' daily log of activities; it loops in live audio and video from the ISS. Oh, and it's technically a social network, allowing you to connect with other digital stargazers by saying "hello" to them, when Cristoforetti is out of your orbit.


Friends in Space was born after Accurat co-founder and design director Giorgia Lupi began corresponding with Cristoforetti on Twitter. The astronaut had seen some of the studio's work and wondered if there was a way to collaborate on her inaugural launch. <a href="https://twitter.com/astrosamantha" target="_blank">Cristoforetti</a> is a new breed of social-media savvy astronaut-she has nearly 84,000 Twitter followers and she updates her Google+ page regularly with scenes from training and her soon-to-be life on the ISS. "She liked the idea of doing something that wasn't scientific," says Lupi. "Something that reminded people on Earth that there is a human up there talking to them."

The ISS makes plenty of information available to anyone who is curious, but much of it is complicated and opaque in the way scientific data tends to be. The design team wanted to distill that down to its most humanistic form. The app pulls in data from Cristoforetti's social feeds and gives context to the daily activities on the ISS by adding media (videos, photos, etc) from NASA. "We're essentially rebuilding a visual diary of her experiences," says Gabriele Rossi, co-founder and managing director at Accurat.

Friends In Space is a fascinating site to toy around on. The visualizations and interactions are simple enough to make the data easy to grasp, but it's complex enough that you'll want to spend some time exploring, seeing how much more you can discover about the mission. Every so often a fuzzy conversation between the astronauts and mission control will pipe into your speaker-it's a nice reminder of the wonderment that comes with space travel. In real time you're hearing someone currently stationed far beyond our comprehension communicating with someone back on Earth. Now, we have the chance-no matter how simple a "hello" is-to communicate back. As Rossi puts it: "We're giving people the possibility to say, 'I once said hello to an astronaut and she said hello back.'"

This story originally appeared on Wired.com