Gadgetory

front and liftoff a year in space starts now Kelly Kornienko and padalka on their way towards the International Space Station hey guys this is sean on the verge and we just watched three astronauts take off for the international space station aboard a 300 tonnes soyuz rocket as the 43rd mission to the international space station but this is no ordinary mission to the astronauts are actually going to go to the station to live for an entire year scott kelly and mikhail kornienko won't walk on this earth again until March of next year and that blows away the previous space station record of seven months setback in 2007 when Kelly comes back he will spent five hundred and twenty-two days off planet more than any other American now the world records are actually held by a couple russian cosmonauts one of which is actually spent over eight hundred days in space and that record is going to be broken by a third crude member gennadiy padalka now we've been sending astronauts to space for about a half a century to the space station into the moon so we know a lot about the effects of microgravity on the body and they're not great radiation exposure is a big worry but so is muscle and bone loss to the point that astronauts actually spend about two hours every day working out on custom-built zero grab the exercise machines but now we can measure these effects better than ever and if we're ever going to get past low Earth orbit we're going to need to know more about what happens to the human body in space that's what this mission is all about NASA will be studying a number of things in the coming year like micro gravity's effect on swelling of the brain vision impairment muscle and bone loss and more now what's even cooler about this mission is NASA's also going to be studying Scott Kelly's twin brother mark here on earth he's a retired astronaut himself they're not going to be in the same controlled environment but NASA is going to be able to use observational research to understand on a genetic level what happens to Scott Kelly's body while he's in space for a year so hopefully NASA is going to learn a lot in the next year with this mission because we're going to need that knowledge if we ever go back to the moon or go even further to Mars NASA wants to send astronauts to orbit the red planet in the late 2030s and there's a whole new set of challenges awaiting us so the more we learn closer the better off we'll be out in space otherwise we're just going to be stuck sending robots