Because I will come back on a different spacecraft with a different crew than for the launch, I can have my own personal mission patch. Here I am able to express all the important symbology that 'is significant to. me.

In the rectangular background, we see parts of three flags. There is a large American Stars and Stripes, because I am American. We also have a smaller Hungarian flag (red-white-green) and a Russian flag (white-blue-red). The former recognizes that I am Hungarian by birth, by my mother tongue, and that grew up in Hungary. The historical Russian flag reminds us that I will be flying-on Russian spacecrafts and be a guest of the Russian segment of the International Space Station. To me it is especially poignant that the Russian flag is not the same as. the former Soviet (red) flag.

On the circular foreground is my name, the mission number, and the year of flight. The motto I chose is "From Ideas to Reality." This refers to the mysterious process of how ideas, such as abstract mathematics, software, or even an intangible human intention, can progress to where they can affect the real world. The rest of the image reinforces this connection by showing an important idea-the theorem of Pythagoras-and the reality of the Soyuz spacecraft visiting the International Space Station orbiting around our Earth.

Of course there is no "Constellation of Pythagoras" visible in the sky, but the point is that the ideas are everywhere and that they can be very powerful indeed.