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posted by janrinok on Monday November 28 2016, @05:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-again,-and-again,-and-... dept.

Eight months have passed since NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko returned to Earth from a nearly year-long mission aboard the International Space Station. During that time, the long-duration fliers completed a battery of follow-up tests, and US and Russian scientists have busily crunched away at data collected before, during, and after the extended space mission. Researchers plan to present preliminary results at a scientific meeting in January.

The one-year mission was just the beginning, however. NASA's Human Research Program, which supports safe and productive space travel, has begun devising follow-up missions to ensure it knows enough about prolonged stays in microgravity before astronauts venture into deep space for extended periods of time. And as important as Kelly's and Kornienko's data is, a study with just two participants doesn't allow scientists to draw meaningful conclusions.

"It's just not enough," said William Paloski, the director of the Human Research Program at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "To extrapolate we need to have more time in space, and more observations. We started working on additional missions two years ago." The question is how best to collect that additional data.

Paloski told Ars that the space agency wants to fly five additional one-year missions on board the International Space Station with a similar setup to the Kelly-Kornienko flight. Each mission will include one Russian and one US or international partner astronaut. NASA hopes to embellish the one-year missions by flying concurrent six-month and six-week missions to directly compare the health effects among the astronauts. The candidate pool for these one-year missions will be broadened to include female and rookie astronauts.


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  • (Score: 1) by messymerry on Monday November 28 2016, @05:48PM

    by messymerry (6369) on Monday November 28 2016, @05:48PM (#434116)

    These tests are all well and good, but it should be clear to everybody that we do not do well in micro-gravity. This is not a problem. We just set the spacecraft to spinning and create whatever level of gravity we need.

    This is a non-issue,,,

    ;-D

    --
    Only fools equate a PhD with a Swiss Army Knife...