Even cooler, NASA has also been monitoring his twin brother Mark (a former astronaut) back here on Earth, and they can now (almost) directly compare how a year in space affects the human body.
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In a few short hours, Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly will again step foot on earth. “I am hopeful, and I think we will learn a lot about longer-duration spaceflight and how that will take us to Mars someday”.
The University of Tennessee graduate has been at the International Space Station longer than than any other USA astronaut.
In this photo provided by NASA and posted on Twitter on October 26, 2015, astronaut Scott Kelly tries on his spacesuit inside the U.S. Quest airlock of the International Space Station. It’s worth noting this isn’t the first time someone has spent a year in space (the Russians did it in the 1990s), though it is the first time scientists have closely tracked vitals at this degree to see the effects.
The men are expected to land in the steppes of Kazakhstan at 0427 GMT Wednesday.
Kelly’s closest US contender trails him by 125 days. By the time their Russian capsule lands in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, the pair will have circled the world 5,440 times and experienced 10,880 orbital sunrises and sunsets.
Kelly finally gets to come home and wash off the space funk on Tuesday night.
“I really respect what he did back then, obviously”, Kelly said, adding that he felt he could match Polyakov’s time in space, if he was called upon to do so, but was also looking forward to coming home.
“I could go another year if I have to”.
This unique study “is absolutely essential if we’re ever going to send people to Mars”, said John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and President Obama’s senior science advisor.
The mission included genetic studies that gathered important data on the effects of very long durations in space on the crew.
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Though Kelly and Kornienko’s expedition was titled the first “One-Year Mission” by NASA and its global partners, at 340 days, it is in fact 25 days shy of a full revolution around the sun.
