Scott Kelly, an astronaut currently onboard the International Space Station tells us tales of the Earth as they are seen from outer space in his most recent tweets. As of right now, he has been aboard the ISS for a year and thus remained in orbit longer than anyone in American history as well as getting the record for total days spent in space – currently his 502nd day.
Kelly will continue his mission in outer space until March this year, when he will return with more than one kind of insightful information. He happens to have a twin brother – Mark Kelly – who is still on Earth. The two are the subject of an ongoing study that attempts to understand and investigate the effects and changes that occur in humans during spaceflight.
So far, the astronaut has reported several issues that he himself has sensed in his own body. Most revolve around affected eyesight, bones, microbiome and circulatory system. Scott Kelly reported having started to feel signs of a weakening set of body functions but not in a degree that would be worrying. However, there is no doubt that the human psyche ends up being affected as well.
Recently, Kelly has done an entire Reddit AMA all the way from outer space in addition to carefully posting constant pictures of the Earth as it is seen from the International Space Station nearly every single day during his stay aboard the ISS. His photos depict the way cities and phenomenal geographical sites on Earth look like from up there, with several ‘sunrises’ and ‘sunsets’ becoming incredibly emotional views of our planet.
However, there is also a huge amount of worrying pictures of our own planet, that Kelly also carefully called “very, very fragile” and that is something we should dutifully take care of. In a conversation with CNN’s Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Kelly said that if he were to look at planet Earth as if it was a human, he would say that the planet looks kind of sick. He mentioned that there are plenty of visible parts of Asia and America that, when looked at from space are not as easily seen because of a haze of pollution.
Kelly also said he happened to notice multiple weather phenomena in unexpected locations such as tropical cyclones that should not take place in those locations under normal circumstances.
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