The tests will continue, to help Nasa learn about how the body copes with the severe strains of spaceflight. Multiple universities are involved in the research.
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“And to get a good data set we need a good mix of subjects, which means women and men, older crew members and younger ones, veterans and first timers”.
HOW do astronauts go to the toilet in space? One test that Kelly was especially interested in was if he could prove that the body grows after his “Year in Space” journey.
One of the things that the scientists will be looking at is how the levels of radiation will have impacted on the astronauts’ DNA. As for donning a spacesuit and getting to work, Charles added, “I get a sense that he could have”.
To meet the challenge, Scott Kelly said he looked at the mission not as a single chunk of time, but as a series of milestones.
“In space without gravity, everybody stretches”.
“Gravity pushes you back down to size”, he says.
Kelly’s said his first food after returning to Earth was a banana he found on the plane from his landing zone in Kazakhstan, although Jill Biden – the wife of Vice President Joe Biden – brought him beer and apple pie on Thursday when he returned home to Houston. So he obviously doesn’t feel 100 percent. He doesn’t have any of that.
NASA sent Kelly to space to study the effects of microgravity conditions on the body and the effects of long-term isolation on mental health. It was a familiar scene to Mark Kelly. He’ll be joined by his identical twin, retired NASA astronaut Mark Kelly.
Bailey’s work is one of 10 NASA-funded studies on the twins. It does appear he wore the suit for the entire flight back to Houston.
MARK KELLY: Oh, thank you, thanks for having me on. On Earth, gravity keeps the vertebrae in place by constantly pushing them together. In a briefing Kelly told reports he “could go for another 100 days or 100 years”.
Other changes he noticed were in his fine motor skills. You’d be welcome to ask him at the news conference today.
He recalled how Asia looked very polluted that the grounds can not be seen very clearly anymore.
“I don’t know where that came from”. An ultrasound machine installed on the space station was used to capture images of Kelly’s heart and eyes.
It will kick off at 4pm when NASA astronauts take to the stage to discuss the objective behind the “year in space” mission.
KELLY: I did provide all this data to NASA over this period of time.
Many of their blood, urine and saliva samples are still up on the space station, frozen. This is why astronauts in the space station must exercise a couple of hours per day on equipment created to simulate the earth’s gravitational field – otherwise they could lose up to 20 percent of their muscle mass within a couple of weeks of beginning space travel. “It’s practically everything to us, and the space station is a great vantage point to observe it”, he said, also commenting on the large swaths of pollution he saw at times. One of the universities is studying a genetic indicator of how people age and that’s the length of your telomeres – telomeres.
And after almost a year sharing pictures of breathtaking views and high-tech equipment, Kelly did something Wednesday that showed he’s just like the rest of us. “Maybe we have a propulsion system that gets us there faster – I think we know enough and we’re close enough”. “I personally think going to Mars-if it takes two years or two and half years, that’s doable”.
“I feel more like an environmentalist since I’ve been up here”.
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On Tuesday, March 1, NASA’s Scott Kelly, accompanied by Russia’s Mikhail Kornienko, touched down in Kazakhstan after spending a whopping 340 days on the International Space Station.
