NEW YORK: In this year there were unbelievable helpful studies about space science. According to the news that NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are getting prepared to go to space journey on March 27. They plan to record all the things which will occur in their tough risky holiday. Scientists are expecting to get many useful things to discover more about mysterious space in the future from this mission.
To kick off a record one-year stay aboard the International Space Station, an orbital marathon both men say is crucial for planning future flights beyond Earth orbit and, eventually, to Mars.
While four cosmonauts logged flights longer than one year between 1987 and 1999, the upcoming flight will be a first for the international lab complex and the first to focus on the long-term biological effects of the space environment using state-of-the-art medical and scientific research equipment and procedures.
“If we’re ever going to go beyond low-Earth orbit for longer periods of time, spaceflight presents a lot of challenges to the human body with regard to bone loss, muscle loss, vision issues that we’ve recently realized people are having, the effect on your immune system, the effect of radiation on our bodies,” Kelly said Thursday during a news conference in Paris. “Understanding those effects are very important.
“If a mission to Mars is going to take a three-year round trip, we need to know better how our body and our physiology performs over durations longer than what we’ve previously on the space station investigated, which is six months. Perhaps there’s a cliff out there with regards to some of these issues that we experience and perhaps there aren’t. But we won’t know unless we investigate it.”
A veteran of three previous space flights, including a shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope and a 159-day stay aboard the station in 2010-11, Kelly is the twin brother of Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut who flew four shuttle missions and who is married to former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
Kornienko also is a station veteran, logging 176 days aboard the outpost in 2010.”The last long-time space mission was on the Mir (space) station and it brought major data for investigations and research about how humans will feel during long-term flights into space,” he said. “I hope that our mission will be an opportunity for others who will follow in our footsteps and take space exploration further.”
Kornienko said his wife cried before his last launch and cried again when he was named to the one-year crew. Asked how his daughter took the news, he smiled and said “she’s 32, and you can congratulate me, I’ve become a grandpa!”
During their year aboard the station, major changes are planned including the installation of new docking adapters on two U.S. ports to accommodate commercial crew ferry craft being built by Boeing and SpaceX, work that will require the robotic relocation of a storage module. At least a half-dozen U.S. spacewalks are planned, including at least three by Kelly, and an unrelated Russian excursion that will include Kornienko.
The work will begin in late January and early February when two current crew members, Expedition 42 commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Terry Virts, carry out three spacewalks to pre-install wiring needed by the docking adaptors and new communications equipment that will be used by Boeing and SpaceX crews approaching and departing the space station.
“I’ll be doing … some of the spacewalks, some of the robotics and a lot of the internal reconfiguration,” Kelly said. “Actually, we’re starting to refer to it as the ‘reassembly of the space station’ because it does involve a lot of EVAs (spacewalks) and internal work on (the) wiring of the space station and moving (components) around. It’s a lot of work, and I’ll be involved in all of it. I really look forward to that, too.”
But the primary focus is on research, serving as both operator and subject in a variety of experiments. In a Time Magazine cover story this week, Mark and Scott discussed the value of research comparing changes experienced by one twin in orbit with the baseline provided by the other twin on Earth.
“This one-year flight is one of many stepping stones towards leaving low-Earth orbit again,” Kelly said at the news conference. “It’s a focused effort to reach across international and technological boundaries to enhance our integrated science on board the space station.”
While station fliers routinely operate a battery of experiments, for Kelly’s flight “NASA has selected 19 collaborative investigations to evaluate the effects of longer duration spaceflight on humans,” he said. “Roscosmos and the Russian space agency selected 14 investigations. And some of those are joint investigations that Misha (Kornienko) and I will be participating in together.”
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