Scott’s twin bother Mark Kelly, a former astronaut himself, stayed on Earth to serve as the “control” subject in the year-long twin study.
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Kelly began his mission to the space station on March 27, 2015, riding a Russian rocket that launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
He snapped hundreds of breathtaking pictures of the home planet and posted them on Instagram and Twitter as StationCDRKelly, not to be confused with ShuttleCDRKelly, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, his identical twin.
As America braces itself for another seven months of bickering over which suited flesh puppet most deserves to lead our country for the next four years, 250 miles up, a much more civilized transfer of power is taking place today.
He has set the American record for the longest duration in space.
In addition to the routine battery of blood tests, physicals and cognitive assessments, there are two broad questions that Kelly’s mission is uniquely able to help NASA answer.
Kelly told reporters that space is a hardship environment in which you never feel perfectly normal. “Scott has not only shared his journey with the world, but he has also engaged with the public”, wrote John Yembrick, NASA’s social media manager. Kelly returns to Earth Tuesday after a yearlong mission.
Kornienko also will come back Tuesday and cosmonaut Sergey Volkov will be on the flight too – though he did not spend a year on the space station.
Twenty years later, two human spaceflight missions made history on the same leap day. But I hope our nation embraces Scott, too, and honors the bravery, service and sacrifice embodied in his year in space. Russia’s Soyuz TM-22 crew of Yuri Gidzenko, Sergei Avdeyev and Thomas Reiter, the latter a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut, landed from the space station Mir on February 29, 1996. While he has been seen wearing prescription glasses before his mission and during his time aboard the ISS, his prescription may have changed in between and it could change again once he’s back on Earth.
Despite all this, Kelly said he could go another 100 days or even another year “if I had to”.
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After Kelly lands, he’ll be flown to Houston on Wednesday, March 2. The results of those tests won’t be available for another year, or so.
