NASA has announced its new schedule and new crew assignments for the coming months.
One of the schedules requires NASA astronaut Christina Koch to remain in orbit until February 2020 and set a record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman.
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Koch will be joined by NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Luca Parmitano, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov on July 20, the official NASA blog states.
While Parmitano and Skvortsov will return in February 2020 with Koch, Morgan will remain onboard the ISS for his extended stay.
Koch is already in space, she was launched to the ISS on March 14th, along with NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin.
But rather than stay for six months, as most of NASA’s astronauts do, Koch is now slated to remain on the station through February 2020. That means she’ll spend 328 days, or nearly a full year, in orbit, which is one of the longest consecutive stays in space by any NASA astronaut.
She’ll just miss beating Scott Kelly’s record of 340 straight days in orbit, the all-time record for a NASA astronaut. But she’ll beat Whitson’s time of 288 consecutive days in space.
The extended missions are aimed at gathering additional data on the effects of long-duration human spaceflight beyond the standard six-month station expedition.