Scott Kelly Breaks NASA Single Spaceflight Record Today
Expedition 45 Commander Scott Kelly has been in space longer than any other NASA astronaut. Today he exceeds Michael Lopez-Alegria’s record of 215 days on a single spaceflight. He passed Michael Fincke’s record of 382 cumulative days in space on Oct. 16.
Kelly also completed his first spacewalk along with Flight Engineer Kjell Lindgren on Wednesday. The duo worked outside for seven hours and 16 minutes on a series of tasks to service and upgrade the International Space Station. They wrapped a dark matter detection experiment in a thermal blanket, lubricated the tip of the Canadarm2 robotic arm and then routed power and data cables for a future docking port.
Meanwhile, the crew is back at work today on advanced space science and routine laboratory maintenance. Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui explored how plants grow without gravity to guide them. Kelly recorded his impressions of the space station’s living and working space for the Habitability study. Lindgren trained for the VIABLE experiment that researches microbe development on station surfaces.
The cosmonauts including Sergey Volkov, Mikhail Kornienko and Oleg Kononenko worked on scheduled tasks in the Russian segment of the orbital laboratory. They explored Earth photography techniques, the physics of plasma crystals and controlling a rover on the ground from space.
