In the end, Mark flew on one more mission, commanding the shuttle Endeavour on its last flight later that year. He ended up calling his brother once or twice a day from space to offer him help and advice. Scott was told of the attempted assassination of his sister-in-law while he was in the space station. During Scott’s last flight, Mark’s wife – Gabrielle Giffords, the Democrat congresswoman – was shot in the head in January 2011 during a gun attack in Tucson Arizona in which six others were killed. Scott has notched up more than 180 days in space, while Mark has logged just under 60. Both became commanders for later space shuttle flights. Mark followed a couple of years later on a flight to the space station. Scott was the first into space, in 1999, on a shuttle mission to service the Hubble telescope. The twins did well at school, co-captained its swimming team, and subsequently became US Navy test pilots before joining Nasa’s astronaut corps. “We do have personalities that differ but you will have to ask someone else what those differences are.” Mark and Scott were born on 21 February 1964 in West Orange, New Jersey, to parents who were both police officers.“Our Mum dressed us alike and stressed our similarities but I don’t think she overdid it,” says Mark. “The tests are scheduled to last at least another year after Scott lands and hey, who knows, in 10 years, they may still be coming back to Scott and I to see how we are doing,” adds Mark. Nor will the experiments on the two men cease at the end of Scott’s mission to the space station – the longest in which a Nasa astronaut will have travelled in space. And all these studies will be mirrored in tests carried out on Mark on Earth. MRI images will also be taken of Scott, while the trillions of bacteria – the microbiota – that live inside the astronauts’ digestive tracts will be sampled and analysed. Analyses will then tell scientists if Scott’s DNA is changing in space. Blood and urine samples will be taken regularly and, in Scott’s case, flown to Earth. In addition, researchers will compare the men’s immune systems, reaction times and the performance of their hearts. They experience the loss of bone and muscle, as well as vision problems and changes affecting motion and balance – and all these will be examined in detail. Researchers already know that life in orbit can have profound changes on astronauts. The Kelly Twin project will examine how individuals with the same genetic profiles respond to radically different environments. “It is a once-in-a-space-programme opportunity,” says John Charles, a senior executive with Nasa’s human research programme. Photograph: ReutersĪs a result, Scott and Mark have agreed to take part in a remarkable experiment, a year-long investigation of the impact of space travel using identical twins as subjects. NASA astronaut Scott Kelly on board the International Space Station in 2010. For good measure, they are identical twins, which makes them even more important to science, for it means that Scott’s biological reactions to unearthly phenomena – zero gravity or elevated levels of radiation – can, for the first time, be compared to the responses of a genetically identical individual on the ground. In fact, Mark and Scott – who will be 51 this month – are the first siblings to fly in space and that certainly makes them special. “I cannot imagine that when Einstein came up with that idea that he ever thought there would be twins flying in space at some point in the near future.” “Certainly his spaceflight is not going to make that much difference.” Nevertheless, it is intriguing that the Kelly brothers will realise the twins-in-space thought experiment, dreamed up by Einstein and others to illustrate the effects of time dilation, a point that is stressed by Mark. “Scott and I are identical twins though I am the elder having been born six minutes before him,” adds Mark. At least, that is what relativity dictates. By contrast, the space station moves at a sedate 17,000mph relative to Earth’s surface – which means that at the end of Scott’s year of space travel, when he returns to Earth in March 2016, he will have aged only about three milliseconds less than Mark who was left behind on Earth. The effects of time dilation only become noticeable when spaceships travelling from Earth approach speeds near that of light. Not that Mark is too worried about the age differential that will develop.
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