This is a legitimately funny space prank

Astronauts can be funny too.
 By 
Miriam Kramer
 on 
Original image replaced with Mashable logo
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Let's be real: If you were stuck in a house-sized tin can for months at a time with only your other crewmembers as company, you might get a little slap-happy and start pranking.

That seems to be what's happening with astronauts onboard the International Space Station right now.

A tweet sent by NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson shows her floating around in a cargo bag that NASA's Shane Kimbrough and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet zipped her into.

According to the tweet, the two astronauts floated Whitson into the Russian half of the Space Station and gave their cosmonaut colleagues quite a surprise when she "popped out" of the bag.

All in all, it sounds like a pretty good space prank.

This is far from the first time NASA astronauts have messed around on the Space Station.

NASA's Scott Kelly dressed up in a gorilla suit and chased one of his fellow crewmembers around on the Space Station during his year-long mission.

Canadian astronaut and internet sensation Chris Hadfield also posted an elaborate series of tweets about an alien on the Space Station as an April Fools' Day joke in 2013.

In general, astronauts and cosmonauts working on the Space Station don't have a ton of time for goofing off. Most of their time on the orbiting outpost is spent either performing experiments or maintenance in the huge laboratory.

Pesquet, Whitson and cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy launched to the Space Station in November 2016 and are expected to spend a total of about six months on the station.

Whitson became the oldest woman to ever fly to space when she launched to the station last year, and she broke another record in January as the oldest woman to go on a spacewalk.

Kimbrough and cosmonauts Andrey Borisenko and Sergey Ryzhikov launched to orbit in October 2016 and are also expected to stay on the Space Station about six months before coming back to Earth.

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Miriam Kramer

Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.

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