NASA has assigned veteran astronaut Scott Kelly to undertake the longest spaceflight ever by an American as he will spend an entire year aboard the International Space Station beginning in 2015 with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko. NASA said the mission will include collecting scientific data important to future human exploration of the solar system.
The astronauts have known each other for years. Kelly was a backup crew member for the station's Expedition 23/24 crews, where Kornienko served as a flight engineer. Kelly and Kornienko will launch aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in spring 2015 and will land in Kazakhstan in spring 2016.
They are assigned to better understand how the human body reacts and adapts to the harsh environment of space during their year-long expedition aboard the orbiting laboratory. Data from the 12-month expedition will help inform current assessments of crew performance and health and will determine better and validate countermeasures to reduce the risks associated with future exploration as NASA plans for missions around the moon, an asteroid and ultimately Mars.
"Their skills and previous experience aboard the space station align with the mission's requirements," said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The one-year increment will expand the bounds of how we live and work in space and will increase our knowledge regarding the effects of microgravity on humans as we prepare for future missions beyond low-Earth orbit."
Kelly is a retired captain in the U.S. Navy, whose twin brother, Mark Kelly (also a noted astronaut) is married to former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. The Kelly brothers hold the rare prestige of being the only siblings to have both traveled in space. Kelly hails from West Orange, N.J. and has degrees from the State University of New York Maritime College and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He served as a pilot on space shuttle mission STS-103 in 1999, commander on STS-118 in 2007, flight engineer on the International Space Station Expedition 25 in 2010 and commander of Expedition 26 in 2011. Kelly has logged more than 180 days in space.
