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 The capsule holding NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, 51, and cosmonauts
Mikhail Kornienko, 54, and Gennady Padalka, 56, slipped into a
docking port on the station’s Poisk module at 9:33 p.m. EDT/0133
GMT. The trio blasted off about six hours earlier.Kelly and
Kornienko are slated to make the first year-long stay on the orbital
outpost, double the current mission durations. Padalka, who is
making his fifth flight, will return to Earth in September after
racking up 878 days in space, setting a new record for the total
amount of time anyone has spent in space.
Four Soviet-era cosmonauts lived on the now-defunct Mir space
station for a year or longer, but the missions, which concluded in
1999, did not have the sophisticated medical equipment that will be
used during International Space Station investigations, NASA said.
 Scientists are interested in seeing how the human body fares during
longer stays in space, as the United States and other countries
begin planning for multi-year missions to Mars.
In addition to more exposure to radiation, astronauts experience
bone and muscle loss and changes in their cardiovascular, immune and
other systems.
Kelly and Kornienko will participate in a battery of experiments
before, during and after their flight to assess psychological and
physiological changes from being in microgravity for a year.
A third participant is Kelly’s identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, a
former NASA astronaut who will serve as a ground-based subject for
genetic and other studies.
“The classic question is ‘How much of our health and our behavior is
determined by our genes, and how much by our environment?’ – the
nature versus nurture discussion,” Craig Kundrot, deputy chief
scientist of NASA’s Human Research Program, said in a NASA
interview.
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“In this case, we’ve got two genetically identical individuals and
we can monitor what kind of changes occur in Mark in an ordinary
lifestyle and compare that to the changes that we see in Scott in
flight,” he said.
While no definitive conclusions can be made from a study of a single
set of twins, scientists hope the experiments may provide clues for
follow-up investigations.
The station, a $100 billion project of 15 nations, is a research
laboratory that flies about 260 miles (418 km) above Earth.
(Editing by Ken Wills)
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