U.S. Astronaut Who Took a Spacewalk And Broke a Record

Recently we have an U.S. astronaut who took a spacewalk and broke a record at the same time. Astronaut Scott Kelly who has spent the last year of his life living in space, took his first ever spacewalk this Wednesday just a few hours before he was about to set a new U.S. flight record.

Kelly and his colleague, Kjell Lindgren, had to take on a large list of maintenance chores which still had to be finished on the outside of the International Space Station. They had to remove some insulation from an electronic unit used for switching and also cover an antimatter and dark matter detector. After this they also had to grease the giant robot arm that the station uses on a regular basis as well as doing a little bit of cable routing.

Mark who is Kelly’s identical twin and a retired astronaut told his brother to pay attention to what he is doing but still try to have a little fun while on the outside. Mark commanded the team that had to deliver the anti matter-hunting Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer back in 2011. Now scientists wanted this device to be covered with a thermal blanket in order to keep it cooler and also prolong its lifespan.

Kelly has been aboard the orbiting lab since March of this year. He will have to stay there until March 2016. The extended duration of time spent in space is part of an experiment that NASA is conducting for a possible Mars expedition. Basically they want to know what types of long term effects space could have on the human body.

Earlier this month Kelly managed to break the U.S. record for the most time spent in space. He has 383 days in space over the course of four missions. His total will be 522 days by the time he is back on Earth.

President Barack Obama has already talked to Kelly and congratulated him for extraordinary feat. Kelly told the president that even though he feels the effects that the mission is having on him he still promises to get to the end without a hitch and return to Earth safely. “Records are made to be broken.”, Kelly said at the end of his talk with the president.

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