As part of its celebration of 20 years of U.S.-Japanese human spaceflight cooperation, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will hold three events in Washington, DC this month.  Registration is requested by tomorrow, October 10.

The three events will be held at the Japan Information and Culture Center (JICC), 1150 18th Street, NW, Suite 100, Washington DC.  They focus on films (in Japanese with English subtitles) about JAXA’s successful HAYABUSA mission that returned samples of an asteroid to Earth.  The October 24 event also features “Space Talk” with JAXA astronaut Norishigi Kanai and NASA astronaut Leland Melvin (currently NASA’s Associate Administrator for Education).   Each event will be followed by a reception.

The events are:

• October 18, 6:30-8:30 pm ET — Welcome Home, HAYABUSA (film by SHOCHIKU Co.)
• October 24
  • 5:00-5:45 pm ET — Space Talk with JAXA astronaut Norishigi Kani and NASA astronaut Leland Melvin
  • 6:00-8:30 pm pm ET — HAYABUSA: The Long Return Home (film by TOEI Company, Ltd)
• October 29, 6:00-8:30 pm ET — HAYABUSA (film by 20th Century Fox Japan)

Registration information is available in our calendar entry here.  Seating is limited, so early registration is required.

NASA made it official today.  Two International Space Station (ISS) crew members will remain aboard the ISS for a one-year mission that begins in 2015, the first time the ISS will host a mission of that duration.

Typical ISS missions these days are for 6 months.  If astronauts are to journey to asteroids and Mars someday, though, experience needs to be gained on how humans react to the space environment — weightlessness, radiation, isolation — for longer periods of time.

NASA’s ISS program manager, Mike Sufferdini, said the one-year mission “will help us move closer to those journeys.”

The ISS usual crew complement is six, but only two of them — one Russian and one American — will stay on orbit for the one-year mission while others come and go.   The Russians paved the way for such missions on its Mir space station and four cosmonauts were in space continuously for one year or more.    Valeriy Polyakov holds the space endurance record of 437.7 days (about 14 months) on Mir from 1994-1995.  Sergei Avdeev was aboard Mir for 380 days in 1998-1999.  Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov were aboard Mir for 366 days from 1987-1988.   In all these cases, other cosmonauts came and left for shorter stays.   Like the ISS, Mir was a modular space station.  It was deorbited in 2001.

Russian space agency (Roscosmos) director of human spaceflight Alexei Krasnov said earlier this week that a year-long ISS mission was being planned.  NASA issued a press release today saying that “NASA and its international partners have announced an agreement” for the one-year mission.   Canada, Japan, and 11 members of the European Space Agency (ESA) are partners in the ISS program along with the United States and Russia.

Update:  NASA officially announced on October 5, 2012 that the ISS partners have agreed on a one-year mission in 2015.

Correction:  This article has been corrected to indicate that a fourth Russian cosmonaut, Sergei Avdeev, also spent one year or more continuously aboard the Mir space station.

Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency reports that Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, and NASA have agreed to a year-long International Space Station (ISS) mission in 2015.

The longest space station mission for a single cosmonaut was Valeriy Polyakov’s 437 day mission (about 14 months) aboard Russia’s Mir space station from January 1994-March 1995.  Regular Mir crews rotated on roughly 6-month schedules like the current ISS crews, but Polyakov stayed through successive crew rotations to test how humans react to long durations in spaceflight conditions.  Sergei Avdeev also stayed over multiple missions from  August 1998-August 1999 for a total of 380 days of continuous spaceflight on that mission.  Two other Russian cosmonauts, Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov, spent a year aboard Mir together (December 1987-December 1988) while other cosmonauts came and went.

Trips to Mars — and possibly asteroids — will require spaceflight durations longer than the typical 6-month space station missions, which apparently is why Roscosmos and NASA have agreed to a year-long ISS mission.

RIA Novosti quoted Alexei Krasnov, head of human spaceflight at Roscosmos, as saying yesterday that the decision has been made to keep one Russian cosmonaut and one American astronaut aboard the ISS for a year in 2015 and all that remains is working out the formalities.  The longest an American has remained in orbit is 215 days, a record held by Michael Lopez-Alegria.  He and cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin were on ISS together from September 2006-April 2007. 

The physiological and psychological strains of spaceflight need to be better understood before mounting missions to destinations far beyond low Earth orbit.  Such missions likely will be international, so tests aimed at understanding the cultural aspects of long duration spaceflight in multinational crews should provide especially useful data.

The announcement comes just weeks after veteran Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka complained about the spartan conditions aboard the Russian segment of the ISS after a four-month stint there.  During a September 21 press conference after the landing of his Soyuz TMA-04M spacecraft, he criticized the accommodations aboard the Russian segment as out of date and Russian space technology as “frozen in the last century” according to an account by James Oberg for MSNBC.com.  Padalka reportedly argued against a year-long mission until significant improvements are made for crew comfort. 

Based on Krasnov’s statement, Padalka’s views apparently were not persuasive in terms of committing to a one-year mission, although Russia’s top political leaders are focused on how to fix Russia’s ailing space industry.

The following events may be of interest in the coming week.   Congress is in recess (except for pro forma sessions) until after the elections.

Monday-Friday, October 1-5

• International Astronautical Congress, Naples, Italy, including meetings of the
  • International Astronautical Federation
  • International Academy of Astronautics
  • International Institute of Space Law

Tuesday-Wednesday, October 2-3

• NASA Advisory Council (NAC) Planetary Science Subcommittee, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC
  • For anyone who missed Orlando Figueroa’s presentation of the results of the Mars Program Planning Group, he is on the PSS agenda to present the report again at 1:00 pm EDT.

Thursday, October 4

• NASA Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG), Monrovia, CA

Thursday-Wednesday, October 4-10

• United Nations World Space Week, celebrating the beginning of the Space Age on October 4, 1957, the launch of the world’s first satellite — Sputnik — by the Soviet Union