NASA astronaut Scott Kelly heads back down to Earth after a year in space
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly bid a bittersweet farewell to the orbital outpost he’s called home for the past 340 days and began the trip back to Earth today. You can watch how he adjusts to Earth’s gravity and the glare of publicity on NASA’s webcast.
Since last March’s blastoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the 52-year-old Kelly has circled the planet more than 5,400 times, seen more than 10,800 orbital sunrises and sunsets, and put 144 million miles on his cosmic odometer.
The mission set a U.S. record for continuous spaceflight and blazed a trail for much longer trips to Mars and back. But to get a true sense of how long Kelly has been in space, consider this: The last time he was on Earth, Jeb Bush was the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination.
Kelly climbed into a Russian Soyuz spacecraft for the homeward trip accompanied by Russia’s Mikhail Kornienko, who is also finishing up a 340-day stay; and Sergei Volkov, who has been in orbit for a mere 182 days. The Soyuz backed away from the station right on time, at 5:02 p.m. PT, executed its crucial deorbit burn and headed toward a landing in the steppes of Kazakhstan at 8:25 p.m. PT (10:25 a.m. local time March 2).
On Monday, Kelly handed over command of the space station to fellow NASA astronaut Tim Kopra. “It’s a little bittersweet,” Kelly acknowledged.
“Thank you for your leadership,” Kopra told Kelly. “You’ve been such a great role model to us.”
Kelly widened the focus of the “Year in Space” experiment to take in more than Kornienko and himself.
“We’ll say something like ‘We did it,’ or ‘We made it,’ but we both recognize that this is a lot more about teamwork and all the people that it takes to put these missions together and be successful than it is about us,” he said. “A really smart person said to me one time, ‘Teamwork makes the dream work in spaceflight.’ Spaceflight is the biggest team sport there is.”
Teamwork comes to the fore once Kelly gets back on solid ground. Researchers will want to know how he adjusts to Earth’s gravity after spending nearly a year in zero-G. Kelly has already mentioned that his vision has been impaired – which is one of the recognized effects of long-duration spaceflight. It’s also likely that he’s lost some bone and muscle mass.
Kelly’s genetic profile and medical readings will be compared with those of his twin brother, Mark Kelly, a former astronaut who has been undergoing a battery of tests to establish a baseline for judging spaceflight’s effects.
It will take months to analyze the medical data. The findings could point up concerns that will need to be addressed to smooth the way for trips to Mars and its moons in the 2030s.
Meanwhile, life on the space station goes on: Three new crewmates – NASA’s Jeff Williams and Russia’s Olek Skriprochka and Alexey Ovchinin – are scheduled to arrive at the station on March 18. Kopra and his crewmates, Britain’s Tim Peake and Russia’s Yuri Malenchenko, are due to finish up their own six-month stint in orbit in June.
Although Kelly’s 340-day stay set a new space endurance record for NASA, the 438-day world record set by Soviet cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov in 1995 still stands. That mark is almost certain to be exceeded someday – and it’s likely to happen on the International Space Station, during a future “Year and a Half in Space” experiment.