The 340-day mission saw Kelly claim the record for the longest single stay in space by a United States astronaut, while Kornienko is now fifth on the list for lengthiest mission by a Russian cosmonaut.
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Piloting the Soyuz capsule home was the much fresher and decade younger cosmonaut Sergey Volkov, whose space station stint lasted the typical six months. Kelly actually has an identical twin brother, former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly, who will serve as the control for more experiments Scott is scheduled to participate in over the next twelve months. Before committing to even longer Mars missions, NASA wants to know the limits of the human body for a year, minus gravity.
Finally tonight: what’s it like to live in space for a year.
“I feel extremely fortunate to have been given this responsibility to be able to do this”, he said in a press briefing before he left the International Space Station at the end of the “Year in Space” mission.
Kelly has now spent more time in space than any other American astronaut. “Talk about aliens. He’s been off the planet for a year”, tweeted Mark Kelly, who retired as an astronaut in 2011.
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. He spent 340 days at the space station, which is the longest any American has been in space.
Kelly was joined in his return to Earth via the Russian Soyuz capsule with Mikhail Kornienko, who also spent almost a year on the ISS.
Commander Kelly explained: “We go through about an hour of field tests of various kinds – one is even like an obstacle course, where you run around, stand up from a sitting position and jump”.
Kelly ventured outside the confines of the space station for three spacewalks during his mission.
Scott Kelly says he is excited to be a part in the research that may lead to a trip to Mars. Posted to Twitter this week, Kelly dressed up…
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The vast majority were astronauts with at least two years of training, but there have also been a handful of space tourists between 2001-2009, some scientists, engineers and politicians as well as a half-dozen or so Air Force pilots. On this flight alone, the pair traveled 144 million miles through space – the average distance between Earth and neighbor Mars – and were exposed to cosmic radiation.
