CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Astronaut Scott Kelly returned to Earth on Wednesday after an unprecedented year in space for NASA, landing in barren Kazakhstan with a Russian cosmonaut who shared his whole space station journey.
Their Soyuz capsule parachuted onto the central Asian steppes and ended a science-rich mission at the International Space Station that began last March and was deemed a steppingstone to Mars.
It was a triumphant homecoming for Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko after 340 days in space. They checked out of the space station 3½ hours earlier. As their Soyuz undocked, calls of “Godspeed” filled the Twitterverse.
The pair traveled 144 million miles through space, circled the world 5,440 times and experienced 10,880 orbital sunrises and sunsets during the longest single spaceflight by an American.
Kelly posted one last batch of sunrise photos Tuesday on Twitter, before quipping, “I gotta go!” His final tweet from orbit came several hours later: “The journey isn’t over. Follow me as I rediscover # Earth!”
Piloting the Soyuz capsule home for Kelly, 52, and Kornienko, 55, was the much fresher and decade younger cosmonaut Sergey Volkov, whose space station stint lasted the typical six months.
They were met by freezing temperatures, just like when they launched from Kazakhstan on March 27th last year.
The two yearlong spacemen faced a series of medical tests following touchdown. Before committing to even longer Mars missions, NASA wants to know the limits of the human body for a year, minus gravity.
As he relinquished command of the space station Monday, Kelly noted that he and Kornienko “have been up here for a really, really long time” and have been jokingly telling one another, “We did it!” and “We made it!”
“A year now seems longer than I thought it would be,” Kelly confided a couple weeks ago.