In this July 12 photograph, Kelly is seen inside the Cupola, a special module which provides a 360-degree viewing of the Earth and the space station. (Photo : NASA)
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly has already officially broken the record for the NASA astronaut who spent the longest cumulative amount of time in space.
From October 16, 2015, the space veteran's total amount of time in space already reached 383 days which places U.S. astronaut Mike Fincke in second for spending 382 days in space. Kelly will return to Earth when his mission ends on March 2016, making a total of 522 space days.
On his Twitter account, Kelly says that records are meant to be broken where he also adds how he is also looking forward for fellow astronauts to break his current record. Apart from breaking this current record, he is also slated to break another one this October 29 for having the longest time spent in lower Earth orbit of 216 days.
Since 1996, Kelly was already been with the space agency where his time in space was taken from four different missions as his current one is to stay at the International Space Station for almost a year.
In this mission, he is a part of many experiments aboard the orbiting space lab, as researchers study how the human body can withstand long term space flight in microgravity. During Kelly's mission, he is also accompanied by Mikhail Kornienko where data will be consolidated and analyzed to determine crew performance regarding physiological effects of space so that in the future, NASA can be prepared for longer space explorations especially to Mars.
NASA mission scientists face many problems and challenges when it comes to manned flights to Mars which can take more than a year of deep space flight to reach the Red Planet. Apart from studying the effects of long term space flight on the human body, scientists are also searching for solutions to reduce travel time in space.
According to NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden, right now, it will become an eight month mission and we would like to cut the travel time in half.
Scott Kelly may be the one to beat as the NASA astronaut to have spent the longest time in space, however, Kelly still has a long way to go to break another record. Currently, the human who spent the most time in space in the whole world is cosmonaut Gennady Padalka who holds the most cumulative amount of time in space totalling 879 days from his last mission.
