Houston, We Have a Family Reunion 75
crimeandpunishment writes "If all goes according to plan, the only space sibling team will be hooking up in orbit. And not only are Scott and Mark Kelly brothers, they're identical twins. Scott took off Friday on a Russian Soyuz rocket to begin a five and a half month mission as the next commander of the International Space Station. Mark is the next commander of the space shuttle Endeavour, scheduled to lift off in February and hook up with the space station March 1st."
Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
Seconds? I think you vastly overestimate the effect. The experiments that tested special relativity used atomic clocks and measured a few nanoseconds after travelling around the world several times in airliners. Even orbitals speeds for several weeks are going to make well under a millisecond's difference. The ISS travels at around 0.0026% of the speed of light. That's much too low for special relativity to have any effects that measurable with anything less sensitive than an atomic clock.
The effects of general relativity are even smaller - there's an experiment scheduled for 2013 that will compare an atomic clock taken to the ISS to one on the ground to test general relativity - the theory predicts a difference of one second over 10,000 years.
Re:Coincidence? (Score:5, Informative)
A few things about that couple:
* They were married after they were both in the space program. They met as astronauts.
* NASA didn't find out that they were married until after the flight assignments were made and the two had been training together for some time. Given their choice, the NASA astronaut's office would have preferred to have kept them separated.
Re:Coincidence? (Score:2, Informative)
There may be more proof here that "It's not what you know, it's who you know!" than people realise... I mean, come on, how many of us young, fit, healthy, brainy people who'd be willing get this chance? What are the odds of them both being "the best of the best of the best, sir"?
Yeah, because if an individual has the right combination of nature and nurture to make him suitable to be an astronaut, what are the odds that someone with the exact same nature and a comparable nurture would be as well?