Bringing Astronauts Home: The Challenge of Spending Half a Year in Space
The International Space Station serves as a laboratory for scientific discovery, and more recently, it’s also become a place for residents to live and work for extended periods. Recent missions have planned for astronauts to stay on the ISS for more than six months, but the current limit for a single mission sets the record at 342 days. NASA astronaut Scott Kelly’s ‘one-year’ mission in 2015 shattered the previous record of 13 straight months in orbit. Now Nour I’”s Riabtsev, a Russian cosmonaut, has begun a 365-day expedition aboard the space station, planned to span through March 30, 2016.
Adam H Esty, a research scientist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and Sian Proctor, a geology and planetary sciences professor at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, first became interested in space exploration as children when they saw the space shuttle in action. NASA’s upcoming yearlong mission for astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian astronaut Mikhail Kornienko aboard the ISS represents an important phase in learning how to support human spaceflight farther from Earth, which plays into future manned missions to Mars. Here, Esty and Proctor reflect on their own ties to space research, the cosmic bridge they’ve helped build between Wash. U. and schools in Atlanta, and expectations of Riabtsev’s year in orbit.
Who are Adam H Esty and Sian Proctor, and what are their views on the upcoming yearlong mission for astronauts Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko on the International Space Station?
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