America’s space champ ready to end yearlong flight, get home

According to NASA, once Kelly returns to Earth, “he will hold the record among US astronauts for cumulative time in space, with 520 days”.

Scientists are investigating how the rigors of long-term spaceflight affect Kelly and Kornienko – an effort that’s aided by studying Kelly’s identical twin brother, Mark, himself a former NASA astronaut, who stayed on the ground and serves as a control for genetic analyses of Scott. Also returning will be Kelly’s crewmate, cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov, of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. “It’s important, clearly, when you’re coming back from space that we get everything right”.

“We absolutely accomplished an incredible amount of work”, Kelly said. Kelly has served as commander of the station since the mission began.

The hardest part likely will be the final hour, which is when the astronauts start to decelerate the spacecraft as they “tumble” to Earth in a spinning motion, slowed by the drag from the atmosphere.

When the project was announced in 2014, Craig Kundrot of NASA’s Human Research Program at the Johnson Space Center said the team would take various measurements and samples of the Kelly twins before the launch, during and after the one-year mission. Kelly has spent a year aboard the space station, longer than any American astronaut.

Kelly has been a keen photographer while onboard the space station, taking photos of Australia, the first flower grown in space and a massive blizzard that hit the U.S. east coast.

Analysis of Kelly and Kornienko will continue even after they return home.

View of Earth from the International Space Station. I am eager to see that gap close by the time we reach Mars. One hypothesis is that astronauts’ eyes change shape in space because blood volume on their upper body increases without gravity.

Many people are doubtful about human journey to Mars, but NASA astronaut Scott Kelly thinks journey to the earth’s neighboring planet is “clearly doable”.

And what’s more interesting than being chased through the International Space Station by a man in a gorilla suit?

“Almost half the time I’ve been here, between sleeping and working on the computer, I’ve spent in a box the size of a phone booth”, he said.

To date, NASA has approximately 15 years of data from the space station about how space affects the human body on six-month missions.