After almost a year in space, Scott Kelly is just a few days away from returning to Earth – and he can’t wait.
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Astronaut Scott Kelly will return to Earth on March 2, but he says that he could do more time if he needed to. It’s all so researchers can see whether he’d be able to hit the ground running if this were Mars instead of Earth. Future NASA destinations under consideration, such as Mars or asteroids, will require much longer periods in space.
Kelly isn’t the first person to spend a year in space-that award goes to Valery Polyakov, who spent a whopping 438 days aboard the Russian Mir Space Station between January 1994 and March 1995; Kelly’s not even the second or third, as two other Russian cosmonauts spent a year or more in orbit aboard the same space station in the 90s.
Kelly, Kornienko and cosmonaut Sergey Volkov are due to depart the station at 8:05 p.m. EST on Tuesday/0105 GMT and land in Kazakhstan 3-1/2 hours later.
On Tuesday at 4:15 there will be a farewell ceremony and the half-hour hatch closure will begin.
The concept was pitched by astronaut Eileen Collins, who suggested that the money generated through space tourism could be used to fund missions into the further reaches of space – manned missions to Mars, for instance.
“We’ll learn a lot about longer-duration spaceflight”, Mr. Kelly said during a news conference on Thursday broadcast on NASA Television.
Second Lady of the United States Dr. Jill Biden, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology Dr. John P. Holdren, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, and Kelly’s identical twin brother and former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly will be in Houston to welcome Kelly home.
Kelly’s vision has degraded a bit as it did during his last mission, a normal outcome for some astronauts because of increased pressure inside the skull in weightlessness. In addition to all the research he has participated in to help scientists better understand how the human body reacts and adapts to long-duration spaceflight, Kelly has taken time to make hundreds of stunning photos.
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Kelly and his crewmates grew red romaine lettuce in the mini-hothouse last summer and sampled some of the crop.
