Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jessica Ulrika Meir is a Swedish and American marine biologist, physiologist, and NASA astronaut born on the 1st of July, 1977, in Caribou, Maine. She is best known for conducting the first all-female spacewalk in history on the 18th of October, 2019, alongside Christina Koch during Expedition 61 on the International Space Station.
On the 18th of October, 2019, Meir and Christina Koch performed a spacewalk lasting seven hours and 17 minutes to replace a faulty Battery Charging Discharging Unit on the ISS. The unit had unexpectedly failed to activate, preventing newly installed lithium-ion batteries from providing additional power. It was the first spacewalk in history carried out entirely by women.
Meir earned her doctorate in 2009 from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography for research on the diving physiology of emperor penguins and northern elephant seals. She also conducted postdoctoral research at the University of British Columbia on bar-headed geese, studying how the birds tolerate the low oxygen levels encountered during their migration over the Himalayas.
Meir launched aboard Soyuz MS-15 on the 25th of September, 2019, alongside cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka and UAE astronaut Hazza Al Mansouri. The crew docked with the ISS six hours after launch. Meir returned to Earth on the 17th of April, 2020, after a 205-day mission.
Yes. Meir holds Swedish citizenship through her mother's country of birth and is the first Swedish woman to travel to space. She is the second Swedish person in space overall, after ESA astronaut Christer Fuglesang.
Meir's father, Josef Haim Meir, was a Baghdadi Jewish Israeli physician born in Baghdad in 1925 who later practiced medicine in Sweden, where he met her mother, Ulla Britt Karlsson, a Swedish nurse from Vaesteras. The family relocated to Caribou, Maine, where Jessica was born. She identifies as culturally Jewish, attended synagogue while growing up, and celebrated a bat mitzvah.