NASA

Sunlight glints off the International Space Station with the blue limb of Earth providing a dramatic backdrop in this photo taken by an astronaut on the shuttle Endeavour just before it docked after midnight on Feb. 10, 2010 during the STS-130 mission.

Under the plan, two astronauts one Russian and one American would blast off in March 2015 on an experimental endurance mission that's twice as long as current space station stays, officials with Russia's Federal Space Agency (known as Roscosmos) said Tuesday (Oct. 3).

"The principal decision has been made, and we just have to coordinate the formalities," said Alexei Krasnov, head of manned space missions at Roscosmos, according to Russian news agency Ria Novosti. "If the mission proves to be effective, we will discuss sending year-long missions to ISS on a permanent basis."

Krasnov added that the space station's partner agencies have already devised a scientific program for the long-duration mission, Ria Novosti reported. [Most Extreme Human Spaceflight Records]

Krasnov did not name the two astronauts who will launch on the marathon mission in the Ria Novosti report. Russia's Interfax news agency reported in August, however, that the NASA crewmember will likely be Peggy Whitson, who stepped down recently as the agency's chief astronaut in order to rejoin its active spaceflying ranks.

A year-long stay aboard the orbiting lab could help lay the groundwork for manned missions beyond low-Earth orbit, by allowing scientists to study how long-term spaceflight affects the human body.

That objective may be of great interest to NASA, which is currently working to send astronauts to destinations in deep space. In 2010, President Barack Obama directed the agency to get people to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, then on to the vicinity of Mars by the mid-2030s.

According to some mission concepts, a manned roundtrip journey to Mars would take about two years to complete.

While nobody has yet resided aboard the International Space Station for a complete year, such a long orbital stay is not unprecedented. Cosmonaut Valery Polyakov, a medical doctor, lived aboard Russia's Mir space station for 438 consecutive days during a mission that began in January 1994 and ended in March 1995.

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Astronauts Will Start Spending A Full Year On The Space Station In 2015