NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is the first American to complete a continuous, year-long mission in space and is now the American who has spent the most cumulative time in space, but it’s not the first time humans have reached this goal. I’m sure his time in space wasn’t as exciting as Matt Damon’s but it’s certainly historic. “After that, I think I might jump in my pool or take a shower”.
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“I’m looking down at the Earth right now and it’s 250 miles below me, and only a small portion of that is the atmosphere”, Kelly said, when asking about preparing for re-entry. The 2017 class of astronauts may fly aboard the International Space Station, two commercial crew spacecraft now in development by US companies, and the Orion deep-space exploration vehicle.
The Year in Space mission adds to Kelly’s accomplished career as an astronaut and ISS crewmember. From a physical point of view, though, he feels “pretty good”.
Kelly will land Tuesday night at 11:25pm in Kazakhstan, likely about 140 kilometers southeast of Zhezkazgan.
Yet he said he could hold out another year in the “harsh environment” of space – where nothing ever feels normal – if he had to.
Next Tuesday, Kelly, Kornienko and Sergey Volkov – who will himself have clocked up 182 days in space – will board the Soyuz TMA-18M capsule for the return leg of their epic space journey.
“We have our work cut out for us with this many applications”, said Brian Kelly, director of Flight Operations at Johnson.
The challenge is supported by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate and managed by NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI).
He said the hardest part of the mission was being physically cut off from friends and family.
No American has spent more than seven consecutive months in space.
The data collection for the twin study goes on for three years, said Julie Robinson, NASA’s chief scientist for the ISS.
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“The objective for the contest is to create algorithms that will receive a pair of noisy stereo images of common space tools such as an Radio-frequency identification (RFID) reader, an EVA handrail or a softbox, among others, and determine the correct 3-D representation of the object in the image pair”, the USA space agency said in a statement. When you’re floating in space for a year, you miss a lot. Scott’s identical twin brother Mark, himself a former astronaut, is spending the year on Earth, enabling researchers to focus on a near-identical comparison of the brothers’ genomics and omics profiles, something never captured before in human space research.
