Kelly’s and Kornienko’s mission will not remotely answer all of the biomedical riddles space raises. Tuesday marks the midway point of his 342-day sojourn aboard the orbiting lab, where he and Kornienk are participating in what NASA has dubbed the “one-year mission”.
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“I feel pretty good overall”, Kelly said in an interview from the ISS, broadcast on NASA television. “And I expect to be around to see it”.
Astronauts go into space regularly and may end up staying there for months at a time, and during that time nature must take its course, meaning that astronaut poop and its disposal method is a real issue.
Other studies including Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko include the “ambitious” Fluid Shifts experiment, which “tests the hypothesis that the normal shift of fluids to the upper body in weightlessness contributes to increased intracranial pressure and decreased visual capacity in astronauts”. But every day spent in space at the close remove of low Earth orbit helps turn at least some of the unknowns into knowns.
NASA and Roscosmos are already investigating ideas for future space station missions to prove technologies and techniques necessary for trips deeper into the solar system.
Kelly said one of the things he misses about being on Earth was being outside.
Kelly presents himself as an excellent subject not only because of his enthusiasm and amusing tweets, but also due to his twin brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, who will become the ideal standard to compare health on Earth and the effects of outer space on the human body.
“Over the years I have met a lot of students who want to be involved in space travel or the space program – not just doing the science or the engineering or becoming an astronaut, but wanting to be ambassadors for their own communities”, Harrison said.
Back in March, Kelly and Kornienko agreed to spend twice the length of a normal mission on the ISS, as NASA and the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) study how extended voyages in space impact the human mind and body.
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The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is launching the world’s first non-commercial Ultra-HD channel with partners SES and Harmonic on November 1, following preliminary testing.
