Two thumbs up from NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly, seen resting in a chair outside of the spacecraft just minutes after he and Russian cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov of Roscosmos landed in a remote area near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan on Wednesday, March 2, 2016 (Kazakh time).
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It took Kelly and a Russian Cosmonaut three and a half hours to reach Kazakhstan from the I.S.S.
Kelly and Kornienko returned with Russia’s Sergei Volkov, who was stationed at the ISS for over five months and was met upon landing by his father, retired cosmonaut Aleksandr Volkov.
Altogether, Kelly will have spent 520 total days in space. By the time their Russian capsule lands in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, the pair will have circled the world 5,440 times and experienced 10,880 orbital sunrises and sunsets. Unfortunately, one of the most entertaining aspects about space is also the most harmful to the human body: microgravity.
Kelly’s Year in Space mission should get us one step closer to sending humans to Mars.
During the 340 days of this mission – which spanned four space station expeditions – Kelly has participated in a variety of research that will help scientists better understand how the human body reacts and adapts to long-duration spaceflight.
During his stay in space, Kelly had become something of a celebrity, building interest in him and in space through his prolific tweeting.
Kelly’s year-long experiment has been fruitful scientifically speaking. “So Scott spending a year in space and NASA studying both of us, because we are genetically the same, that’s going to give NASA a lot of information to reach out into the solar system”. Several government officials will be there to greet the space hero, including his twin brother and fellow NASA astronaut, Mark Kelly, and Vice President Joe Biden’s wife, Jill Biden.
During the mission, Kelly completed almost 400 scientific experiments.
Astronaut Scott Kelly performed death-defying spacewalks, grown and eating successfully grown lettuce in the outer space and chatted with people from school kids to President Obama. The space station remains the springboard to NASA’s future missions to an asteroid and Mars.
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The record for consecutive days spent in space by an American astronaut was previously held by Michael Lopez-Alegría, who spent 215 straight days in 2007.
