Scott Kelly has been on the ISS for six months, and he has six more to go. The two men are to spend a total of 342 days on the global Space Station in order to explore the effects on a human body of spending an extended time in space.
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In addition to scientific advances, the Kelly and Kornienko mission presents an opportunity to warm relations between the United States and Russian Federation ; the research collected will be shared between the two countries, as will the costs.
NASA and Roscosmos are already looking at continuing the Fluid Shifts investigation with future space station crews beyond the one-year mission.
NASA is preparing for long-term missions to deep space with the help of a pair of identical twins.
Thanks, NASA for all the TMI about what you’re doing to poor Scott Kelly, for taking an entire layer of the sheen off the glamour of being an astronaut, and for ruining shooting stars for all us.
Till date this has been the longest any NASA astronaut has ever stayed in space, however Russian cosmonauts have spent several mission that have lasted a year or even longer on the MIR station. For example, Kelly will see as many as 10,944 sunrises and sunsets during his year in space.
“It’s unbelievable because it’s faster than if you were on Earth and sending it to a clinical lab”, says Andy Feinberg, director of the Center for Epigenetics at Johns Hopkins University, and one of the bio-med researchers working on the year in space mission.
In this Tuesday, September 15, 2015 image made from video provided by NASA, astronauts Scott Kelly, left, and Kjell Lindgren, aboard the worldwide Space Station, speak to actors from the movie “The Martian”.
Other space enthusiasts were quick to chime in as well, with one user noting that “unless [NASA] invented a completely new kind of camera”, the extraterrestrial body in question certainly could not be our great source of light and heat, despite its impressively bright appearance. Space travelers on a journey to the Red Planet would travel through millions of miles of empty space, far from home and locked up with the same group of people for the entire trip. The end for Kelly is not until March 2016.
Not only are the Kelly sharing many genetic traits, they also have has careers that were similar, both were pilots in the Navy who later become astronauts during 1996.
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Space isn’t a very human-friendly environment to put things mildly.
