One-Year Space Station Crew Receives a Warm Welcome in Star City, Russia

Expedition 45-46 Commander Scott Kelly of NASA and cosmonauts Sergey Volkov and Mikhail Kornienko of Roscosmos participated in traditional welcoming ceremonies at their training base at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia on March 25, several weeks after landing in their Soyuz TMA-18M spacecraft in Kazakhstan. The crew laid flowers at a statue of Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, and then led a procession of well-wishers to the House of Cosmonauts where other ceremonial activities took place. Kelly and Kornienko spent 340 days in space after launching in March 2015 to gather valuable biomedical data on the long duration effects of weightlessness on the human body that will be used to formulate a human mission to Mars. ________________________________________ FOLLOW THE SPACE STATION! Twitter:   / space_station   Facebook:   / iss   Instagram:   / iss