Hello,
I am not an astronaut and I have never traveled into space. However, I did attend the U.S. Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama when I was in high school. Space Camp was a lot of fun. We learned how the astronauts train for missions on board the Space Shuttle and did two simulated missions.
It might be fun to travel into space someday, but most scientists who study the Earth's magnetosphere and the Sun are not astronauts. Most of us use data from unmanned satellites to study physical processes that occur in places where it might be very difficult or even dangerous to send a human astronaut. The satellites used by space scientists have special instruments that can detect things that an astronaut cannot see, touch, hear, smell or taste. For example, the SOHO spacecraft has instruments to detect ultraviolet light from the Sun. Other unmanned satellites can detect x-rays, measure high energy electrons traveling close to the speed of light, or detect radio waves in space.
Kris