By Lloyd Campbell
If all goes as planned, on March
27th, a Soyuz rocket carrying the
expedition 42 crew consisting of Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka,
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko
will launch on a six-hour flight to
dock with the International Space
Station. The launch will begin a oneyear mission for Kelly and Kornienko
aboard the station, the first time
anyone has stayed in space for a
year or more, since the last cosmonaut flew that long ending in 1999.
Kelly and Kornienko will become
only the fifth and sixth human being
to spend that long in microgravity, and Kelly will be the first NASA
astronaut to stay in space continuously for longer than six months.
For Kornienko, this will be his second spaceflight. He resided on the
station once before from April 2,
2010 to September 25, 2010 as an
ISS-23 flight engineer with cosmonaut A. Skvortsov and astronaut
Tracy Caldwell-Dyson (NASA). He
also performed a spacewalk that
lasted for 6 hours and 43 minutes.
Kelly will be making his fourth
spaceflight having flown his first
mission in December of 1999 as
pilot of Space Shuttle Discovery
on the STS-103 mission. The mission was the third Hubble Space
telescope servicing mission and restored the telescope to full working
order once again. He flew again in
August of 2007 on the STS-118 mission to continue the assembly of
the International space Station. He
served as Commander of the mission and it successfully delivered the
third starboard Truss segment. His
third spaceflight was a six month stay
aboard the International Space Station where he assumed command
of the station on Expedition 26.
Scott Kelly also comes with an
additional benefit, a twin brother,
former Astronaut Mark Kelly, will be
back on Earth and any changes that
happen to Scott can be checked
against Mark. This means that Mark
will not be a typical research control subject, since his environment
and living habits will not mimic those
of Scott’s on the space station. So
the research is considered observational in nature. There are no defined
outcomes for the investigations;
instead, this is a chance to compare data collected from genetically similar astronauts to observe
the human effects of spaceflight.
In a news conference on Dec 18,
2014 you could tell Scott was ex-
stay in space for this long of duration, however medical and technological advances will allow better understanding of the changes
Kelly and Kornienko experience
over the longer duration mission.
With six month missions aboard the
ISS being almost routine since 1998,
scientists have acquired enough
data to begin to characterize the
effects of six-month sojourns in
weightlessness on astronauts’ bodies.
Hopefully the one-year mission will
show if the trends continue at the
previous rates or if they decrease
or increase, requiring new or modified ways to counteract them. This
will help NASA prepare the spacecraft, equipment, and the explorers themselves as they venture to
an asteroid, Mars and beyond.
Some of the things the researchers will be looking at are :
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, wearing an
Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuit. Credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz
cited about his upcoming mission,
“What makes this exciting for me,
this one-year flight is about the science and everything we’re going to
learn from expanding the envelope
on the space station greater than
what we’ve currently done. If we’re
ever going to go to Mars someday,
the International Space Station is really a great platform to learn much
more about having people live and
work in space for longer durations.”
The main purpose of the one year
mission is to help us better understand the medical, psychological
and biomedical challenges explorers may face on an extended stay
mission. As previously mentioned,
they will not be the first humans to
• Known changes that have yet
to be resolved, such as changes
in the eye during spaceflight. Over
30% of NASA astronauts have experienced this change. It is now
known that there are structural
changes to the eyes of some longduration astronauts (those in space
for six consecutive months or longer). It is suspected this could be
due to an increase in intracranial
pressure, or increased fluid pressure in the head and spine, which
may be due to changes in body
fluid volume and distribution.
• Investigation of the physiological cost of spaceflight adaptation,
what changes occur in the crew
member’s body chemistry and metabolism, their immune function,
cardiovascular capacity, and bone
architecture. It’s already known that
long-term exposure to weightlessness
causes a physiological, multi-system
adaptation in crew members. These
changes affect the ability of crew
members to move and function
upon immediate return to a gravitational environment. Scientists would
like to assess functional abilities,
physical performance and the state
of the physiological systems in crew
members shortly after their
return to Earth. The intent
Follow the latest happenings on the ISS at:
is to develop methods for
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_page