Space Station Live: Aging in Space
NASA Commentator Lori Meggs at the Marshall Space Flight Center speaks with Dr. Susan Bailey of Colorado State University, the principal investigator of the new Telomeres study on the ISS....

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Space Station Live: Aging in Space - Video

Preparing to go to space for a year is no walk in the park. But with two years of training behind them, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko did, in fact, visit a park. They spent their last couple of weeks on Earth participating in traditions dating back to the very first human to leave the planet.

Kelly and Kornienko, together with cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, are set to launch to the International Space Station on Friday (March 27) from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Central Asia. After a four-orbit, six-hour flight, they will take up residency on board the outpost, with Kelly and Kornienko beginning the space station's first yearlong mission. (Padalka will stay in space for the more typical six months.) You can watch live coverage of the yearlong mission today on Space.com.

Although their mission will mark a first, their path to launch included a traditional set of events steeped in Russian spaceflight history. [See photos of the one-year space mission]

Here is a list of some of the customs the two spacefarers have and are still to participate in:

On March 6, prior to departing the training center at Star City, located just outside of Moscow, Kelly, Kornienko and Padalka visited the office of the first person to fly in space, the late Yuri Gagarin, which has been preserved as part of the center's cosmonaut memorial museum. There, they sat at Gagarin's desk and, following tradition, signed a guest book that has been autographed by the crews that have preceded them to space.

On the same day, the three crewmates also visited Red Square in Moscow, where they laid red carnations at the Kremlin Wall where Gagarin and other Russian space icons are interred.

"It is a great tradition that the Russians have coming here and honoring the cosmonauts and other folks that worked in the space program," Kelly told a NASA interviewer. "It is really great to be a part of this."

After flying from Moscow to Baikonur on March 14, the trio took part in a traditional flag-raising ceremony, symbolizing the official start to the final stage of their prelaunch preparations. Kelly, together with his backup, NASA astronaut Jeffrey Williams, raised the American flag, while Kornienko and Padalka hoisted the Russian colors. The cosmonauts' backups, Alexei Ovchinin and Sergei Volkov, raised the flag of Kazakhstan.

A practical forest now stands in Baikonur, where 50 years ago one did not. This is thanks to a tradition dating back to Gagarin's launch. Each crewmember plants a tree in a grove located along the Avenue of the Cosmonauts. Gagarin's tree now stands tall, whereas the trees planted for Kelly, Kornienko and Padalka on March 21 were just saplings.

On March 23, the three took "ownership" of their spacecraft, Soyuz TMA-16M, during a customary handover ceremony between the crew and the team at Rocket and Space Corporation (RSC) Energia, the company that builds the capsules and boosters. The same event included an opportunity for Kelly, Kornienko and Padalka to climb into the Soyuz and check out their ride to orbit.

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Cosmic Traditions: One-Year Space Crew Marks Flight with ...

Astronaut Scott Kelly, left, and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko plan to spend more than 11 months aboard the International Space Station to collect data on the long-term physiological and psychological effects of the space environment. NASA

Shuttle veteran Scott Kelly first heard about NASA's plans to send an astronaut to the International Space Station for nearly a full year shortly after he completed his third space flight in 2011, a 159-day stay aboard the orbital lab complex.

The idea wasn't particularly attractive.

"At first, I'll be honest with you, I wasn't all that interested," he said. "I hadn't given it a whole lot of thought, and it was soon after I had gotten back from my last flight. So the difficulty of living and working in space for a long period of time was still kind of fresh in my mind."

But he thought about it. Then he thought some more.

Finally, after "mulling it over and talking about it with my family, friends, girlfriend, I decided the challenges that staying in space for a whole year presented were appealing to me, even considering the sacrifices you and your family are in for to do that kind of thing."

In November 2012, Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, veteran of a 176-day stay aboard the station in 2010, were assigned to what NASA bills as the "One-Year Mission." Now, after more than two years of training in the United States, Russia, Europe and Japan, they're finally ready to go.

Joined by Soyuz TMA-16M commander Gennady Padalka, one of Russia's most experienced cosmonauts, Kelly and Kornienko are scheduled for blastoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 3:42:57 p.m. EDT Friday (GMT-4; 1:43 a.m. Saturday local time), departing from the same launch pad used by Yuri Gagarin at the dawn of the space age more than 50 years ago.

If all goes well, the trio will dock at the space station's upper Poisk module around 9:36 p.m. after a four-orbit, six-hour rendezvous. Standing by to welcome them aboard will be Expedition 43 commander Terry Virts, cosmonaut Alexander Shkaplerov and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti.

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Astronaut Scott Kelly braces for yearlong space flight

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is seen inside a Soyuz simulator at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center on March 4 in Star City, Russia. Kelly, along with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko of the Russian Federal Space Agency, are scheduled for launch Friday aboard a Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. NASA/Bill Ingalls hide caption

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is seen inside a Soyuz simulator at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center on March 4 in Star City, Russia. Kelly, along with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko of the Russian Federal Space Agency, are scheduled for launch Friday aboard a Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Later today, a Russian rocket is scheduled to carry a Russian cosmonaut and an American astronaut to the International Space Station, where they will live for a full year, twice as long as people usually stay.

No American has remained in space longer than 215 days. Only a few people have ever gone on space trips lasting a year or more the longest was 437 days and they're all Russian cosmonauts. The last year-plus stay in space occurred nearly two decades ago.

What's more, NASA's upcoming mission offers scientists a unique opportunity to study the effect of spaceflight on the human body. That's because the astronaut making the trip, Scott Kelly, has an identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, who's a retired NASA astronaut.

Initially, NASA did not plan to compare the earthbound twin with the one on the long-duration space mission. But after Scott Kelly got this assignment, he went to a briefing to get ready for a press conference.

"And I asked the question, 'Hey if someone just asks ... will there be any comparative studies between you and your brother, how should I answer that?' " Scott Kelly recalls in a NASA video.

A few weeks later, he explained, a program scientist came back to him and said, "It actually looks like this might be something that the science community is interested in."

Over the next year, researchers will scrutinize the Kelly brothers in what NASA is calling the Twins Study. Ten separate investigations will look at space travel's effect on everything from gut bacteria to eyesight.

Christopher Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, will be searching for changes in gene activity. "The advantage of this study is that we will get a complete profile, I would even argue the most comprehensive molecular profile of a human being that's maybe ever been generated," says Mason. "And then, to boot, we'll get the comparison of someone on Earth who's the identical twin."

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NASA To Study A Twin In Space And His Brother On Earth

Preparing to go to space for a year is no walk in the park. But with two years of training behind them, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko did, in fact, visit a park. They spent their last couple of weeks on Earth participating in traditions dating back to the very first human to leave the planet.

Kelly and Kornienko, together with cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, are set to launch to the International Space Station on Friday (March 27) from Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Central Asia. After a four-orbit, six-hour flight, they will take up residency on board the outpost, with Kelly and Kornienko beginning the space station's first yearlong mission. (Padalka will stay in space for the more typical six months.) You can watch live coverage of the yearlong mission today on Space.com.

Although their mission will mark a first, their path to launch included a traditional set of events steeped in Russian spaceflight history. [See photos of the one-year space mission]

Here is a list of some of the customs the two spacefarers have and are still to participate in:

On March 6, prior to departing the training center at Star City, located just outside of Moscow, Kelly, Kornienko and Padalka visited the office of the first person to fly in space, the late Yuri Gagarin, which has been preserved as part of the center's cosmonaut memorial museum. There, they sat at Gagarin's desk and, following tradition, signed a guest book that has been autographed by the crews that have preceded them to space.

On the same day, the three crewmates also visited Red Square in Moscow, where they laid red carnations at the Kremlin Wall where Gagarin and other Russian space icons are interred.

"It is a great tradition that the Russians have coming here and honoring the cosmonauts and other folks that worked in the space program," Kelly told a NASA interviewer. "It is really great to be a part of this."

After flying from Moscow to Baikonur on March 14, the trio took part in a traditional flag-raising ceremony, symbolizing the official start to the final stage of their prelaunch preparations. Kelly, together with his backup, NASA astronaut Jeffrey Williams, raised the American flag, while Kornienko and Padalka hoisted the Russian colors. The cosmonauts' backups, Alexei Ovchinin and Sergei Volkov, raised the flag of Kazakhstan.

A practical forest now stands in Baikonur, where 50 years ago one did not. This is thanks to a tradition dating back to Gagarin's launch. Each crewmember plants a tree in a grove located along the Avenue of the Cosmonauts. Gagarin's tree now stands tall, whereas the trees planted for Kelly, Kornienko and Padalka on March 21 were just saplings.

On March 23, the three took "ownership" of their spacecraft, Soyuz TMA-16M, during a customary handover ceremony between the crew and the team at Rocket and Space Corporation (RSC) Energia, the company that builds the capsules and boosters. The same event included an opportunity for Kelly, Kornienko and Padalka to climb into the Soyuz and check out their ride to orbit.

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Cosmic Traditions: One-Year Space Crew Marks Flight with Russian Spaceflight Customs

Today, astronaut Scott Kelly will board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft bound for the International Space Station. Hell spend a year in low-Earth orbit, in part as a lab rat in a study that looks at how his body responds to life in space. The cool part here is the control group: Scotts twin brother Mark, also an astronaut, is staying on Earth, making him a genetically matched basis for comparison. Its an intriguing experiment, but as far as human space travel goes, its no giant leap. Humans havent left low-Earth orbitjust a couple hundred miles above where youre sitting right nowsince 1972, when astronauts last walked on the moon.

Robots, though? Robots are having all the fun. Uncrewed spacecraft have ventured to almost every corner of the solar system, andat this very minuteare exploring alien worlds from asteroids and comets to planets and dwarf planets. Which makes it tempting to declare that space exploration should be the realm of robots, not humans. People are expensive, hard to maintain, and they can die. Who needs the grief?

Well, we do. The crewed space program and the robot space program are two different things with two different purposes. And we need them both.

Yes, when it comes to science, robots kick butt. Theyre tough, cheap, and no one besides sci-fi sentimentalists cares if they never come home. Everywhere you look in the solar system, a robot is there. Rosetta is orbiting a comet, waiting for the Philae lander to wake up. Dawn is at the icy dwarf planet Ceres, which might have a subsurface ocean. In a couple months, if all goes well, New Horizons will become the first human-made object to visit Pluto. Juno is scheduled to arrive at Jupiter next summer.

And those are only the recent missions. Cassini has been studying the Saturnian system for more than a decade, and a couple weeks ago found evidence that Saturns moon Enceladus has hydrothermal ventsa hot environment that could harbor life. The Curiosity rover continues to explore Mars, and its smaller predecessor, Opportunity, passed the 26-mile mark this past weeka marathon that took more than 11 years. Oh, and the Messenger spacecraft, launched in 2004, is wrapping up a mission at Mercury. The Voyager probes are in interstellar space. All these robots have sent invaluable data back home, teaching us about how the universe works. NASAs Mars rover Curiosity, Feb. 3, 2013. NASA The human space program, on the other hand, has never been about science. The driving force behind Apollothe pinnacle of the human space programwas to show up the Soviet Union. The Cold War is over; the human space program no longer has an existential purpose.

Which is why its struggling. How badly? After NASA retired the space shuttles in 2011, the agency was left without a way to get people into orbit. It became a space agency that couldnt get to space. Private companies like SpaceX, Orbital ATK, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada are all trying to fill the gap. But theyre still just doing what people did decades ago. Commercial space at this point with respect to human space flight is somewhat a sideshow, says John Logsdon, a space policy expert and historian at George Washington University. All thats happening is two firms, SpaceX and Boeing, are under contract to develop a taxi to take people to the space station. Other than that, theres a lot of talk.

But critically, while the human space program may not have an overarching mission, it does have a purpose. A 2014 report from the National Research Council cited the economy, science, education and inspiration, national security, andno kiddinghuman survival. We humans are perpetually in jeopardy if we stay on Earth, whether from nuclear war, climate apocalypse, or a good old-fashioned killer asteroid (a classic). If humanity is to survive, we have to spread out.

More than that, though, that NRC report also cited a shared destiny and aspiration to explore. Now, that might sound sort of flaky. Logsdon ranks the idea long with all the other clichs that one tends to spout when talking about the future of humanity. But even he wants people to boldly go. He remembers when men went to the moon. Knowing what was happening, knowing here there were true explorers going to a new placeit was about as exciting as you can get, Logsdon says. Its about inspiration, adventure, and pride in what we can accomplish together as a species. Astronaut Scott Kelly along with his brother, former Astronaut Mark Kelly at the Johnson Space Center, Jan.19, 2015. NASA Eventually humans will be able to do some exploring, too. We can do things robots still cant. The ability to react to surprises or to decisions that need to be made tacticallythats directly in the realm of the human endeavor, says Jim Bell, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University who has worked on every Mars rover mission. A person analyzing the Martian terrain could rely on experience and instinct; all a robot has is software and time-delayed commands.

And eventually, the two programs will reunify. NASAs Deep Space Network was the communications link for the Apollo missions, and now connects a bunch of interplanetary robot spacecraft with home. We wouldnt have healthy robotic exploration without the human exploration program, Bell says. The robots will eventually be scouts, finding the places where people can and should follow up.

By outsourcing its role in low-Earth orbit to the private sector, NASA can focus on deep space. It has started work on a new Orion spacecraft and the space launch system, the most powerful rocket ever built. Theyve even souped up the huge crawler transporters used to carry the rocket to the launch pad. This week, NASA announced a new missionusing a robotto pluck a rock off the surface of an asteroid, testing capabilities the agency says people will need on a trip to Mars. Were further along the path of making it happen than we ever have been, says Logsdon.

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Soon, Humans Will Follow Robots Into Deep Space

The Innovative Technology Partnerships Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center inGreenbelt, Maryland, announced the release of its core Flight System (cFS) Application Suite to the public. The cFS application suite is composed of 12 individual Command and Data Handling (C&DH) flight software applications that together create a reusable library of common C&DH functions.

The cFS application suite allows developers to rapidly configure and deploy a significant portion of the C&DH software system for new missions, test platforms and prototypes, resulting in reduced schedule and cost. The cFS framework takes advantage of a rich heritage of successful NASA Goddard flight software efforts and addresses the challenges of rapidly increasing software development costs and schedules due to constant changes and advancements in hardware. Flight software complexity is expected to increase dramatically in coming years and the cFS provides a means to manage the growth and accommodate changes in flight system designs.

The cFS is currently being used by the Core Observatory of NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, launched onFeb. 27, 2014, from Tanegashima Space Center inJapan, and it has also been used by NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field,California, on their most recent mission, the NASA Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), which launchedSept. 6, 2013. Other centers such as NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center inHuntsville, Alabama, NASA's Glenn Research Center inCleveland, Ohio, and NASA's Johnson Space Center inHoustonare currently using the cFS as well.

The core Flight Executive (cFE) and the Operating System Abstraction Library (OSAL) are two cFS components previously released as open source. These two components provide a platform-independent application runtime environment. The 12 applications in this release provide C&DH functionality common to most spacecraft Flight Software (FSW) systems.

This means the current suite of cFS open source applications now provide a complete FSW system including a layered architecture with user-selectable and configurable features. These architectural features coupled with an implementation targeted for embedded software platforms makes the cFS suitable for reuse on any number of flight projects and/or embedded software systems at very significant cost savings. Each component in the system is a separate loadable file and are available to download free of cost at the links listed in the table.

The complete cFS software suite will fully support the cFS user community and future generations of cFS spacecraft platforms and configurations. The cFS community expects the number of reusable applications to continue to grow as the user community expands.

For more information on the core Flight Software System, please contact the NASA Goddard Innovative Technology Partnerships Office at 301-286-5810 or emailtechtransfer@gsfc.nasa.gov

To learn what other NASA software programs are available for industry use, please visit the NASA Technology Transfer Program's Software Catalog at:

http://software.nasa.gov

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NASA Goddard Releases Open Source Core Flight Software System Application Suite to Public