Space-Time: Scott Kelly Breaks Time-Aloft Record For US Astronauts (usatoday.com)

NASA astronaut -- and Commander of the International Space Station -- Scott Kelly on Friday broke the record for time in space -- for U.S. astronauts, at least; the overall longest flight of 437.7 days belongs to Valeri Polyakov, and the Washington Post points out that Russia’s Gennady Padalka has spent a total of 879 days aloft. Kelly brings a unique asset to the long-term study of health for spacefarers, because his twin brother Mark, here on Earth, serves as close to a perfect control subject as NASA could hope to have. Kelly is a prolific tweeter about the progress of his year-long mission aboard the ISS; on the occasion of beating the time-aloft record, his modest acknowledgement read only, "Records are meant to be broken. Look fwd to one of my colleagues surpassing my end 500+ days on our #JourneyToMars!"

Comments

Re:Well Done

[CanadianMacFan]

Yes, I'm sure that they are only going up only for studying the effects of zero gravity and not because it's a trip of a lifetime.

Scott Kelly on Friday

[wonkey_monkey]

Scott Kelly on Friday

Did he change his name in hope of getting a talk show when he comes back down?

Re:500 days to Mars is a good thing?

[delt0r]

Lets run numbers. Assume 1g~10m/s2 the whole way and ignore the sun and orbital mechanics (turns out for many cases this is not so bad, max V will still be accurate to first order anyway). We turn around in the middle of course so max speed is in the middle. The max distance is 401 million km. So that is a top speed of 2000km/s or about 0.07% the speed of light. In practice it would be slightly higher by about 50km/s. Of course most of the time mars is much closer and you would be going much slower. Also this trip would take 112 hours.