In this January 21, 2016 photo made available by NASA, one-year mission crew members Scott Kelly of NASA, left, and Mikhail Kornienko of Roscosmos celebrate their 300th consecutive day in space.
Advertisement
In the meantime, Kelly capped off his year of tweeting from space with a series of photos – his final photos of Earth’s sunrise.
‘We’ll learn a lot about long-duration spaceflight and I’d like to think that this is one of many stepping stones that will take us to Mars some time in the future, ‘ said Cmdr Kelly.
“They train you to keep your hands and arms inside of your body enclosure to make sure you don’t break anything”, Wheelock said. Wheelock said the astronauts may be bracing themselves for what has the potential to be a jolting return to Earth.
“I’ll probably never see it again”, Kelly told Gupta. “I’ve flown in space four times now so it’s going to be hard in that respect…”
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.
Kelly is heading home on Tuesday from a record breaking stay at the International Space Station. What, arguably, is more valuable though is that Kelly has an identical twin, his brother Mark – also an astronaut – is acting as a control.
Below he explains how extended time in space can result in bone loss, vision loss, and unsafe radiation exposure.
The two Space Station crewmembers will now be put through their physical paces before ever leaving the landing zone in Kazakhstan.
He began his year in space on March 27, 2015.
Kelly passed on command of the ISS to NASA astronaut Tim Kopra after living on the space station for 340 days, the longest an American has spent in space.
Kelly is an American astronaut, and Kornienko a Russian cosmonaut.
Not quite a year – 340 days to be precise, based on the Russian launch and landing schedule.
Advertisement
Right now, Kelly is getting ready to board a Russian Soyuz capsule with his one-year-mission partner, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko.
