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ISS News

The #AlmostOneYearInSpace Mission Ends

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
March 2, 2016
Filed under ,
The #AlmostOneYearInSpace Mission Ends

Soyuz Crew Arrives Back on Earth
“NASA astronaut and Expedition 46 Commander Scott Kelly and his Russian counterpart Mikhail Kornienko returned to Earth Tuesday after a historic 340-day mission aboard the International Space Station. They landed in Kazakhstan at 11:26 p.m. EST (10:26 a.m. March 2 Kazakhstan time). Joining their return trip aboard a Soyuz TMA-18M spacecraft was Sergey Volkov, also of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, who arrived on the station Sept. 4, 2015. The crew touched down southeast of the remote town of Dzhezkazgan.”
Scott Kelly’s giant step for mankind: James Lovell, USA Today
“Even an old astronaut like me can still marvel at the power of President Kennedy’s declaration more than a half-century ago that space was the “new ocean” and one we must “sail on.” Sailed we have. For more than 50 years, we have explored those dangerous and unknown waters to become a leader in space: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, the space shuttle, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Mars rovers and the International Space Station an orbiting base occupied for the past 15 years by an international crew. Now we have another American achievement and milestone in our space program: One of our countrymen has spent nearly a year off of our planet. Astronaut Scott Kelly has orbited our planet more than 5,000 times, traveling well over 100 million miles aboard the International Space Station.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

28 responses to “The #AlmostOneYearInSpace Mission Ends”

  1. TheBrett says:
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    I hope the data is better than the Russian experiments you pointed out back in the 1970s.

    • Todd Austin says:
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      The comments I read do tend to indicate that the tech is better now, so that they would be able to extract a more useful set of data.

      That being said, it seems to me that what we need, assuming current propulsion technologies for getting to Mars, are data on how people and other animals respond to long-term exposure to fractional gravity.

      If we are able to send humans to Mars in a craft tethered to a counterweight placed in a spin, they might experience the equivalent of some significant fraction of gravity along the way. And, of course, once the crew arrive, they will experience an extended period – weeks to years – in the 0.38g field of Mars. Data on this subject are sorely lacking and desperately needed.

      With the addition of a centrifuge module (started by JAXA, acquired by NASA, then abandoned in Japan) to ISS, perhaps riding uphill on Falcon Heavy, we would finally be in a position to do the sort of work we’ll need to do on long-term exposure to fractional gravitational fields that will make possible the planning and execution of a #JourneyToMars.

      • TheBrett says:
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        Good post.

        I wonder what would be easier: tethering a Dragon capsule to something else Gemini 11 style and spinning them up, or building a new module for it to either be free-floating or attached to ISS. The Centrifuge Accommodations Module was just too small to do good long-term partial gravity tests on humans – we need something bigger.

        • DJE51 says:
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          Yeah, like maybe the moon surface?

          • Jeff2Space says:
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            Except lunar gravity is quite a bit less than Mars gravity. So, if the destination is Mars, we should be investigating 0.38g, not 0.17ɡ.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            Countermeasures that work on the Moon (at .17g) will also work on Mars (at .38g). In contrast the physiologic effects of living in a centrifuge module in LEO are not comparable to a Mars base even at the same g because overall movement and physical activities are much more restricted in the centrifuge.

          • TheBrett says:
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            Preferably a way of testing it that doesn’t require building a ton of lunar landing hardware. There’s easier ways to simulate lunar (and Mars) gravity.

        • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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          I would fully support a rotating space station, say a long truss with a docking array in the middle and a module at either end of it, where it could be spun up to simulate Mars gravity. Maybe they could even put a module on the truss at the Lunar gravity point.

          • TheBrett says:
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            The only downside is that you’d need a long access tunnel from the two modules being spun up to the docking array, unless you want the astronauts to suit up every time they leave the modules.

          • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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            Quite right. I have given that a bit of thought, rigid tunnels might be able to be integrated into the truss segments, but each one would then need to be joined together, and each joint will be heavy. So perhaps one long flexible tube, compressed down to one end of the truss array for launch and then later extended down the truss to connect to the modules. That would minimize the number of joints needed for the access tunnel.

          • Michael Spencer says:
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            doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you’d want to build in LEO.

          • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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            Well, it would be built on the ground and then assembled in LEO. Unless I take your meaning wrong and you meant something else.

          • Michael Spencer says:
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            I think I meant (it was yesterday, after all) that it sounds like very cranky hardware- the long tube, I mean, for access. Just keeping the structure stiff. Lots of ‘skin’ exposure to flying stuff out there.

            I wonder what else could be done with so much hardware?

            Dr. Crary points out some interesting numbers below. If I read him right, a comfortable device would be a behemoth.

          • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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            I was envisioning something like the Bigelow material, folded and packed down in one truss segment. Add 3 or 4 truss segments together then extend the compacted tube down the whole length of the truss. It would be fixed in place at with the central docking node at one end and the habitat area at the other, with the truss itself providing external bracing.

            A comfortable device would indeed have to be very large.

            There’s a nice “Spin Calculator” here:

            http://www.artificial-gravi

            The size required is one of the problems with rotating things in space to provide artificial gravity. Trusses will have to be massive. If it’s a tether, it has to be long, strong, retractable, and can’t twist, kink, or jam. If you want to run power or data down it, that’s another can of worms.

        • fcrary says:
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          Before people get too excited about tethered vehicles and spin for gravity, there are some physiological limits. If memory serves, someone did some work at Ames about how fast you can spin people. If they are moving around, I believe 3 rpm is a serious limit, and not exceeding 1 rpm is probably a better idea.

          3 rpm makes for convenient numbers. At that rate, you need to be 100 meters from the center of rotation to get 1 g (almost exactly; it’s 9.87 m/s^2.) And it’s linear with radius, so 38% gravity would mean 38-meters. It’s 9 times longer at 1 rpm. So if you want a tunnel from one end to another, it’s going to be a long one.

          • TheBrett says:
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            Wouldn’t a tether make more sense in that situation? We could probably do a tether for rotation with a total length of 200 meters between two rotating modules (or two 100 meter tethers if we want them to rotate around a central module). Gemini 11 had a 30-meter tether, for example.

            Whereas building a truss that’s over 200 meters long is going to be much more difficult. You also probably wouldn’t want to try and build a pressurized tunnel over that whole length – it might be better to have something like a pressurized “cable car” on a second tether that could move between modules.

          • Michael Spencer says:
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            Sure it would, but then this would be inconsistent with NASA’s approach to things.

            On the other hand, a tether implies a permanent living space for the humans; it’s a long way in a space suit, which is how this thread started, imagining some sort of air-tight tube. How do the engineers figure this out- building a tethered space habitat is new engineering, after all?

            It’s another example of the tech being absolutely ignored by NASA. It is the kind of tech that *could* open the solar system. Or not.

          • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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            There’s a nice “Spin Calculator” here:

            http://www.artificial-gravi

  2. Half Moon says:
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    1 year in space (well, almost); meh.

  3. Jeff2Space says:
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    NPR said more than once this morning that the astronauts “spent more than a year in space”. No, they didn’t.

    The NASA PAO “Year in Space” message certainly is strong and unquestioned by much of the media.

    • Bernardo Senna says:
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      The “More than Eleven Months in Space” – MEMoS mission.

    • SpaceMunkie says:
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      maybe a Venusian year, but certainly not Earth year

    • fcrary says:
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      It’s an old trick, and sometimes called “big lie” propaganda. You come up with one, short phrase (“Astronaut spends One Year in Space”, “The State Department is full of Communist agents”, etc.) You repeat it again and again, and get other people to do so as well (preferably people from different organizations, but other people from your own organization will do; it just can’t come from a single voice.) After a while, people have heard the phrase so many times that they consider it something “everyone knows’ and automatically considered common knowledge. Anyone contradicting it will be asked for proof the statement is false. No proof of the original statement is required and the statement doesn’t even need to be true. All it takes is endless repetition.

  4. Vladislaw says:
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    I added 11 months to a some posts on facebook .. no one seemed to appreciate it.

  5. Littrow says:
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    Too late now, but there was so much hype about the “one year mission”, why didn’t NASA keep him up there another 3 weeks and make it a true 1 year mission?

    • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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      He got a 3 week vacation at the end, from accumulated PTO, that was added to the end of the time spent on the ISS. He simply chose to use that PTO down on Earth.

  6. Michael Spencer says:
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    He couldn’t wait to get home, according to reports over the past weekend. I’m not sure how to feel about it. On the one hand lots of people would beg for the chance to do what he regarded as work. Maybe the ISS is just a sucky place to live.

    • Hug Doug ✓ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ says:
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      From what I’ve heard, the ISS is smelly, noisy, and while there’s lots to do, there are few opportunities to just be by yourself for a while. But I think if you are gone anywhere for 11 months and a week, you will be excited to be going home again near the end of that time.