NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei arrived at the International Space Station on April 9, 2021, and will return home March 30, 2022, after spending 355 days in low-Earth orbit. This duration breaks the previous record, held by retired NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, by 15 days.
Vande Hei will return in a Soyuz spacecraft as scheduled alongside cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anton Shkaplerov.
While clocking the single longest spaceflight by a NASA astronaut, Vande Hei contributed to dozens of studies from the hundreds executed during his mission, including six science investigations supported by NASA’s Human Research Program, or HRP.
In this image from March 2017, Vande Hei trained for a spacewalk at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Image Credit: NASA