RocketSTEM Issue #10 - February 2015 | Page 21

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly (foreground) and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko participate in an emergency scenario training session in an International Space Station mock-up/trainer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Credit: NASA/James Blair functions, create a time course for recovery, and develop field technologies that allow crew members to assess their own physiological changes. Autonomous medical testing is crucial for crew members in successfully carrying out tasks upon terrestrial landings, as well as recovering and adapting to their environment. • Evaluate the current methods being used to counteract the physiological changes we already know occur, such as improved ex- and lunar and planetary expeditions. As always, there are other things to be done on the station during their mission other than biomedical research. But they’ll be there in a very exciting time for the station. Two new docking adapters will be installed on two U.S. ports to accommodate the upcoming commercial crew spacecraft currently being designed and built by Boeing and SpaceX to bring astronauts to the ISS using American launch vehicles. This in- Learn more about the one-year mission at: http://www.nasa.gov/content/one-year-crew/ ercise protocols to maximize the benefit (reducing the negative physiological effects of spaceflight, such as bone loss and muscle atrophy) while minimizing the crew members’ time required. • Behavior and performance, especially sleep and wake cycles, cognitive performance, and team efficiency, including brain imaging pre-and post-flight. This research also looks at behavioral issues associated with isolation and confinement. Assessing how confinement affects individual and group performance will be crucial for long duration missions cludes moving one of the ISS storage modules using the stations robotic arm to a new location. Currently there are at least six U.S. spacewalks planned including at least three by Kelly to support all the changes. “I’ll be doing some of the spacewalks, some of the robotics and a lot of the internal reconfiguration,” Kelly said. “Actually, we’re starting to refer to it as the ‘reassembly of the space station’ because it does involve a lot of EVAs (spacewalks) and internal work on (the) wiring of the space station and moving (components) around. It’s a lot of work, and I’ll be involved in all of it. I really look forward to that, too.” With their third crew member, cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, only staying for six months, and the fact that the Soyuz spacecraft are only allowed to stay in orbit for six months, some creativity was required to make sure Padalka returned home before the other two, and that there was a “fresh” spacecraft for the Year Long duo to return to mother Earth in. In steps singer Sarah Brightman, the first “space tourist” paying for a ticket to visit the station since 2009. She will launch on September 1st along with ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen and spacecraft commander Sergei Volkov aboard the Soyus TMA-18M spacecraft. Upon docking the trio will boost the stations occupant count to nine. This will last for just 10 days however as Brightman and Mogensen will return to Earth with Padalka in the TMA-16M spacecraft that he launched in with Kelly and Kornienko six months earlier. This will leave the TMA-18M spacecraft in place and Volkov will be the spacecraft commander when he returns to earth with Kelly and Kornienko on March 3, 2016. The mission will have lasted 341 days if the launch and landing dates do not change. 19 www.RocketSTEM .org 19