Cristoforetti, popularly known in Italy as AstroSam, will join three other crew members on the Minerva mission to the International Space Station (ISS), with take-off scheduled from the NASA Kenney Space Center in Florida on Saturday.

An astronaut with the European Space Agency (ESA), Cristoforetti will be launched into orbit on a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft with three NASA astronauts: Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines and Jessica Watkins.

Her new TikTok account has already garnered over 37,000 followers, who are eager to experience life in space.

One of Cristoforetti’s first videos on the platform show her preparing and eating “space food”, while another introduced her crew members.

Cristoforetti, 44, is Italy’s first woman to travel to space and holds the record for the longest uninterrupted spaceflight by a European astronaut (199 days, 16 hours) from her mission to the ISS in 2014.

The Milan native chose the name Minerva for her latest mission, in reference to the ancient Roman goddess of wisdom.

As part of the mission she will carry out experiments and research on the effects of micro-gravity on ovarian cells, which in the future could lead to new medical treatments to combat cancer.

On her last mission in 2014, Cristoforetti became the first astronaut to brew “extraterrestrial espresso”.

This time she is taking olive oil to the ISS, to see how the quality of the oil changes in space and also because it gives flavour “even to the rehydrated salads that we eat up here”.