MOSCOW: The American astronaut Scott Kelly and his Russian counterpart Mikhail Kornienko have blasted off to begin a year away from Earth.
Gennady Padalka of Russia is also riding in the Soyuz spacecraft; he is scheduled for the standard six-month tour of duty aboard the International Space Station.
The trip is Nasas first stab at a one-year spaceflight, will feature experiments necessary to plan for a manned mission to Mars that would last two to three years.
The Soyuz set off from Russias manned space launch facility on the steppes of Kazakhstan and was due to dock with the space station hours later.
Kellys identical twin Mark, a retired astronaut, agreed to take part in many of the same medical experiments as his orbiting sibling to help scientists see how a body in space compares with its genetic double on Earth.
Mark is the husband of former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot and seriously injured in 2011.
Kelly, 51, and Kornienko, 54, took off from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, one of the oldest launch facilities on Earth.
Kelly will be the first American to spend a continuous year in space; Russian Valeri Polyakov spent more than a year on the Mir space station in the 1990s.
During their year-long mission, 12 other astronauts will join them for shorter stints including Padalka, a Russian who has spent more than 700 non-consecutive days in space. After this trip Padalka he will have spent more days in space than any other human being.
More than 40 years after Americans landed on the moon, many in the US consider spaceflight relatively routine, but its dangers remain as destructive to human beings as ever, and sometimes as mysterious: eyeballs distended by brain fluid floating weightless around the skull, pathogens made more virulent by the variables of space, bone loss, muscle atrophy, radiation. Guardian News Service
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