“Scott Kelly’s one-year mission aboard the International Space Station has helped to advance deep space exploration and America’s Journey to Mars”.
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Piloting the Soyuz capsule home for Kelly, 52, and Kornienko, 55, will be the much fresher and decade younger cosmonaut Sergey Volkov, whose space station stint lasted the typical six months.
“We have landing”, Russian Mission Control confirmed after the trio touched down southeast of the settlement of Dzhezkazgan in central Kazakhstan at around 0430 GMT.
American astronaut Scott Kelly will end the first-ever year-long mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS) after a trek back to Earth on Tuesday that will last more than seven hours. Both he and Kornienko had longed to experience nature during their mission at the International Space Station.
Before his return, Kelly said vacating the space station would be bittersweet.
Shortly after landing, Kelly, Kornienko and Volkov will enter a medical tent to participate in a series of “field tests” that will assess their balance, co-ordination and ability to walk.
Kelly is an especially important part of the study because when he zoomed into orbit previous year, he left an exact genetic copy of himself on Earth: his twin and fellow astronaut Mark Kelly.
Kelly and his Russian roommate for the past year, Mikhail Kornienko, landed in barren, frozen Kazakhstan on Wednesday. Kelly is helping NASA develop protocols and techniques the agency will use for a crewed mission to Mars. The mission was created to see how the human body can cope with long periods in space, in preparation for possible missions to Mars. The studies included research on how the human body adjusts to weightlessness, isolation, radiation and the stress of long-duration spaceflight, NASA’s website reported. The ultrasounds and blood tests onboard the space station and during the many months back on Earth will reveal the extent of this decay, but also how quickly the body recovers. Kelly beat his closest US contenders, in terms of time in space, by 125 days.
The study will help NASA prepare its Mars explorers, who will spend more time in space.
The world’s longest missions were carried out by four Soviet-era cosmonauts aboard the now-defunct Mir space station, including a flight from January 1994 to March 1995, spanning almost 438 days by record holder Valeri Polyakov, a physician.
Spending 340 days in space could affect a person’s vision and bones, but Kelly said last week that physically, he feels pretty good.
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The space veteran said he has witnessed some of the most fantastic scenes of Earth during his mission, like spotting the northern lights, passing over the Bahamas and watching huge storms like Hurricane Patricia.
