First off, what is the One-Year Crew? Obviously, they’re doing something for a year, but what, and why?
Two
crew members on the International Space Station have just met the
halfway point of their year in space. NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly and
Russian Cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are living in space for 342 days and
will help us better understand the effects of microgravity on the human
body.
Why 342 days and not 365? Thought you might ask. Due to
crew rotation schedules, which involve training timelines and dictate
when launches and landings occur, the mission was confined to 342 days.
Plenty of time to conduct great research though!
The studies performed throughout their stay will yield beneficial
knowledge on the medical, psychological and biomedical challenges faced
by astronauts during long-duration spaceflight.
The weightlessness of the space environment has various effects on the human body, including: Fluid shifts that cause changes in vision, rapid bone loss, disturbances to sensorimotor ability, weakened muscles and more.
The goal of the One-Year Mission is to understand and minimize these effects on humans while in space.
The Twins Study
A unique investigation that is being conducted during this year in space is the Twins Study.
NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly’s twin brother Mark Kelly will spend the
year on Earth while Scott is in space. Since their genetic makeup is as
close to identical as we can get, this allows a unique research
perspective. We can now compare all of the results from Scott Kelly in
space to his brother Mark on Earth.
But why are we studying all
of this? If we want to move forward with our journey to Mars and travel
into deep space, astronauts will need to live in microgravity for long
periods of time. In order to mitigate the effects of long duration
spaceflight on the human body, we need to understand the causes. The
One-Year mission hopes to find these answers.
Here are a few fun tidbits on human spaceflight to put things in perspective:
1) Scott Kelly has logged 180 days in space on his three previous flights, two of which were Space Shuttle missions.
2)
The American astronaut with the most cumulative time in space is Mkie
Fincke, with 382 days in space on three flights. Kelly will surpass this
record for most cumulative time in space by a U.S. astronaut on October
16.
3) Kelly will pass Mike Lopez-Alegria’s mark for most time on a single spaceflight (215 days) on October 29.
4) By
the end of this one-year mission, Kelly will have traveled for 342
days, made 5,472 orbits and traveled 141.7 million miles in a single
mission.
Adapted from : http://nasa.tumblr.com/post/129151446854/the-one-year-mission
