A Soyuz capsule carrying American astronaut Scott Kelly, his Russian counterpart Mikhail Kornienko, and Russian crew member Sergey Volkov landed back on Earth safely today.
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For over the past 11 months Kelly and Korneiko have travelled 144 million miles in space, orbiting the globe 5,440 times and encountering about 10,888 sunrises and sunsets made them write their names in golden words in space history.
This was Kelly’s fourth mission, bringing his lifetime total to 520 days in space.
After a few minutes, Kelly and cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov were moved to a medical tent where they underwent several tests, such as measurements of their vision, balance, muscle tone, strength, nimbleness of their fingers, and so forth.
The space station is NASA’s springboard toward the stages in space exploration, including “future missions to an asteroid and Mars”.
On Tuesday, astronaut Scott Kelly’s record mission to stay in space came to an end.
During the record-setting One-Year mission, the ISS station crew conducted 400 investigations, ahead of NASA’s Journey to Mars, including research into how the human body adjusts to weightlessness, isolation, radiation and the stress of long-duration spaceflight.
Combined with his other three trips to space, Kelly has now spent 540 days of his life in orbit.
Kelly and Kornienko had checked out of the space station 3½ hours earlier.
Ah, there’s nothing like a blast of fresh, frigid air to welcome you back to the planet after almost a year cooped up in space.
Scott Kelly Back on Earth!
Coinciding with the one-year mission is the twins study.
A USA astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut have returned to Earth Tuesday after an historic 340-day mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Kelly handled two NASA-contracted cargo flights – SpaceX’s Dragon, the company’s sixth commercial resupply mission and Orbital ATK’s Cygnus during the company’s fourth commercial resupply mission.
More than 200 people form 15 different countries have lived and worked at the International Space Station since November 2000.
Kelly, along with his identical twin brother Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut, also are participating in genetic studies, the first to assess if genetic changes take place during long spaceflights.
Kelly indicates he is ready to go another round.
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“Those of us who dream of sending astronauts to deep space thank Scott Kelly for his sacrifice”, said Jim Green, director of planetary science for NASA, “and are thrilled to welcome him home”.
