CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — After more than two years of training, astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are eager to begin their yearlong mission about the international space station.
A Soyuz rocket carrying Kelly, a 51-year-old retired Navy captain, and Kornienko, a 54-year-old former paratrooper, will lift off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Saturday.
It will be the longest space mission ever for NASA, and the longest in almost two decades for the Russian Space Agency, which holds the record at 14 months.
Medicine and technology have made huge leaps since then, and the world's space agencies need to know how the body adapts to an entire year of weightlessness before committing to even longer Mars expeditions. More yearlong missions are planned, with an ultimate goal of 12 test subjects. The typical space station mission is six months.
''We know a lot about six months. But we know almost nothing about what happens between six and 12 months in space,'' said NASA's space station program scientist, Julie Robinson. Among the more common space afflictions: weakened bones and muscles, and impaired vision and immune system.
Neither Kelly nor Kornienko, though, worries about himself. They fret about the family and friends they are leaving behind for an entire year — until next March.