A 59-year-old Russian cosmonaut has become the first person to spend 1,000 days in space. Russian space agency Roscosmos said Wednesday that Oleg Kononenko achieved the cumulative space time record having made five journeys to the International Space Station dating back to 2008.
One of the reasons we send people up there is to experiment on ways to mitigate the effects of long-term exposure to the radiation and micro-gravity.
Micro-gravity also allows for biological experiments that are too costly or complex to achieve planetside. So not only is he testing protocols and treatments for long-term space travel, but he’s working towards therapies and treatments which become available to the earthbound.
It’s a real shame that they never got to install the centrifuge module on the Iss. It was supposed to be big enough for a person to fit in, and would spin to simulate gravity. The best way to mitigate damage is to remove the thing that’s damaging you. We don’t test how to survive radiation exposure by having people stand next to some plutonium and see how many jumping jacks stop them from getting cancer. We have protocols about how long you can be around radiation, and how fast you need to leave the area. Microgravity would be treated the same way: how long until it starts affecting your health, and what’s the minimum amount of rotational artificial gravity needed to stave off the effects.
Well… if you’re looking for cutting edge microgravity research, I guess there’s always The Wentian experiment module over on the CSS