Scott Kelly grew 2 inches during his time aboard the International Space Station, NASA’s Jeff Williams said.
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Scott Kelly, whose spine elongated while he spent 340 days in space, took less than two days to shrink.
Kelly returns home after spending nearly a year in space, the longest single stint by an American astronaut. He also now holds the us record for the lost cumulative time spent in space.
“It’s really not a good thing, and one of the problems is sometimes they don’t fit back in their suits to come back in the planet so we have to plan for that slight growth”, says Henry Ford Hospital surgeon and NASA scientist Scott Dulchavski.
A day earlier, Cdr Kelly had touched down in a bitterly cold Kazakhstan along with Russian cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergei Volko. But, astronauts have actually lived in space for months longer than Kelly’s stay in the pre-ISS days of Russia’s Mir station.
NASA will have to address these concerns during a Mars mission, where a round trip journey would last a year or more.
NASA was not the only space agency to design studies on the human body for Kelly, said John Charles, Human Research Program associate manager for worldwide science.
Gravity exerts a lot of pressure on the spine. After his previous half-year space station mission five years ago, he wasn’t almost this exhausted or sore. Kelly returned to Earth taller and younger than he would have been if he’d never left.
The SacBee News notes that, “But even if Kelly hadn’t had his vitals checked immediately upon landing, he might have noticed the slight height change: One of the first Earthlings he saw was his identical twin, retired astronaut Mark Kelly – a man now notably, if only temporarily, shorter”.
When astronauts return to Earth, they must re-adjust to gravity and can have issues with balance and simple tasks like standing up, walking or operating a vehicle.
That being said, he is happy to be home, saying that “the hardest part is being isolated from people on the ground who are important to you”.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Fresh from a year in space, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly said Friday his muscles and joints ache.
As for the bigger takeaways that could help inform a future mission to Mars, NASA scientists said today they don’t have those yet and stressed that data still needs to be carefully analyzed and will take time.
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Researchers will closely monitor changes endured by Scott’s body as part of their “twin study”.
