A search and rescue team has located the capsule.
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Kelly and fellow One-Year Mission participant Mikhail Kornienko will undergo field tests to see how well the two astronauts are doing as they return to Earth. Astronauts also lose significant bone and muscle mass in space, something they attempt to combat by working out up to two hours every day.
While up there, Kelly took more than 1,000 photos of sunsets, sunrises and the Northern Lights.
During the record-setting One-Year mission, the station crew conducted nearly 400 investigations to advance NASA’s mission and benefit all of humanity. Apart from cloning a guy and sending his doppelgänger us, this is the closely we can get to a control base for the effects of space travel. NASA astronaut Jeff Williams and Russian cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Oleg Skripochka are scheduled to launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on March 18. “I’d like to think that this is another of many stepping stones to us landing on Mars sometime in our future”.
The choice of the pioneering Kelly turned out to be a bonanza. NASA will now compare those results to his identical twin brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly. “Talk about aliens. He’s been off the planet for a year”, Mark Kelly joked via Twitter.
Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are set to depart tonight. That’s 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 brother’s wife, former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
Kornienko returns to his home in Star City, Russia, near Moscow, to his wife, daughter and toddler grandson.
This was Kelly’s fourth mission, bringing his lifetime total to 520 days in space.
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The U.S. senator from New Jersey – who sits on Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, which overseas NASA – introduced a resolution in the Senate to honor Kelly for his yearlong space expedition, which Booker described a “massive achievement for mankind”.
