He is scheduled to arrive at 11:45 p.m. Wednesday, and will be greeted by NASA officials; Jill Biden, the wife of Vice President Joe Biden; and his identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, also an astronaut.
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KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/Getty Images Scott Kelly greets recovery crews after being helped out of a Soyuz capsule, ending his 340 days in space. Kelly and Korniyenko have been selected for what is called the ISS Long Year Mission, where the two astronauts will be spending almost a year on the space station, with Kelly spending about 340 days there.
It is the longest time humans have spent living on the International Space Station (ISS). The pair’s return on March 1 marks the end of 340 days aboard the space station and nearly 143 million miles during their time in space, roughly the same average distance between Earth and Mars.
NASA’s Jeff Williams and Roscosmos’ Oleg Skriprochka and Alexey Ovchinin, will join them, following a launch from Baikonur later this month. Aside from the fact that, as Kelly said recently, “a few inches from you is instant death”, there are lasting effects of being in a low-gravity environment even when the missions are a complete success.
One of his biggest hopes for the Year in Space mission’s legacy is that it helps NASA on its quest to take astronauts farther away from Earth on longer space flights – a necessity for traveling to Mars in the future.
After more medical checks and tests in a nearby tent, recovery crews planned to fly Kelly, Kornienko and Volkov to Dzhezkazgan for a traditional Kazakh welcome home ceremony. They checked out of the International Space Station 3½ hours earlier.
This was Kelly’s fourth mission, bringing his lifetime total to 520 days in space.
Kelly will then head to Houston with two flight surgeons and several other NASA reps, where he’ll be reunited with his two daughters, ages 21 and 12; his girlfriend, a NASA public affairs representative at Johnson Space Center; and his brother and his wife, former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
For NASA, that mission possible is Mars.
Mr Kelly, Mr Kornienko and Mr Volkov leave behind Mr Kopra, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and the European Space Agency’s British astronaut Tim Peake. Realizing this is likely his last journey, it was “a little bittersweet” saying goodbye to his orbiting home.
“We’ll say something like ‘We did it, ‘ or ‘We made it, ‘ but we both recognize that this is a lot more about teamwork and all the people that it takes to put these missions together and be successful than it is about us”, he said.
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Welcome back to Earth, Astronaut Scott Kelly!
