American astronaut Scott Kelly returned to terra firma on Wednesday, completing a record 340 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
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A Soyuz capsule carrying Kelly, Kornienko and Russian crew member Sergey Volkov parachuted down on to a steppe in Kazakhstan at 10:26 local time (04:26 GMT). “Nasa astronaut Jeff Williams and Russian cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Oleg Skripochka are scheduled to launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on 18 March”.
His 340 consecutive days in space sets a United States record – but falls short of the world record of 438 days set by a Russian cosmonaut in the 1990s.
The space station is NASA’s springboard toward the stages in space exploration, including “future missions to an asteroid and Mars”. Scott Kelly returned from the International Space Station with two of his comrades after record USA spaceflight.
Acting as human guinea pigs, in the kindest sense, Kelly and Kornienko have spent a year in space in order to see whether the human body can withstand long durations in space, all as part of our attempts to see whether deep space missions with humans is possible.
Kelly and his roommate for almost a year, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, check out of the International Space Station on Tuesday night, US time.
The one-year mission was created to help NASA better understand what happens to an astronaut’s physical and mental health during a prolonged stay in a micro-gravity environment. Despite plummeting 250 miles at speeds of up to 17,000 miles per hour, the journey home went smoothly.
The idea behind the twin study is to help minimise extraneous factors as scientists research how genetically identical individuals respond to different conditions over a year.
Scott Kelly spoke with AOL.com about about how astronauts train to be mentally prepared for such a long stay away from home. That will include direct comparisons between Scott Kelly and his twin brother ex-astronaut Mike Kelly.
He led the ISS team in growing lettuce and other plants aboard the station, becoming the first humans to eat food cultivated in space.
Kornienko also is coming back Tuesday and cosmonaut Sergey Volkov is on the flight too – though he did not spend a year on the space station.
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Another focus will be the effects of weightlessness on Kelly’s eyesight, which he has already said has changed in his mission time.
