Twin astronauts may meet up in space

Scott Kelly posts as StationCDRKelly. He recently returned from a trip to Japan to train at the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, which commands the station's giant Kibo module.

"We have a great relationship with our intl partners' one of the many things that make this a great program," he tweeted Monday.

The twins join a cadre of other spaceflyers sharing the experience of being a professional astronaut via the social microblogging site. Currently, four twittering people are in space: space shuttle Discovery crewmembers Christer Fuglesang (CFuglesang), Jose Hernandez (Astro_Jose), and Tim Kopra (Astro_Tim), and station crewmember Nicole Stott (Astro_Nicole). With the exception of Fuglesang, who posted Twitter updates until launch, all of the astronauts are either tweeting from space or plan to during their mission.

Hernandez is posting his tweets in Spanish and English, while Fuglesang translated his into his native Swedish. The public can even use Twitter to spot the space station when it flies overhead.

But the Kelly brothers are the first sibling astronauts to embrace the medium to reach out to the public. They grew up in West Orange, N.J., and both joined the NASA astronaut corps in 1996. Each is a Navy captain, and both have served as space shuttle commanders before.

(Edit:Ruby)