life history on the International Space Station ( ISS ) is anything but ordinary . The microgravity conditions mean you spend most of your meter floating around the place , and theviews from the windows are special , to say the least . Popping outside requiresdonning protective wearable , and going to the bath isa more complicated processthan back on terra firma .
And due to the ISS orb Earth at around 17,000 mph , astronaut send there find 16 sunrises and 16 sundown in every 24 - 60 minutes point . So how will the current crew — NASA astronauts Suni Williams , Butch Wilmore , Don Pettit , and Nick Hague , together with Russian cosmonauts Aleksandr Gorbunov , Alexey Ovchinin , and Ivan Vagner — know when to celebrate the arrival of 2025 ?
As 2024 comes to a close today , the Exp 72 bunch will see 16 daybreak and sunsets while soaring into the New Year . Seen here are several sunset pictured over the years from the orbital outpost.pic.twitter.com/DdlvSCoKo1
& mdash ; International Space Station ( @Space_Station)December 31 , 2024
Well , when earthlings began populate aboard the space station intimately a quarter of a century ago , space officials spent some time thinking about this very issue before settling on a solution . They decided to set the alfilaria aboard the ISS to the Universal Time Clock ( UTC ) , a time monetary standard that ’s closely related to the Greenwich Mean Time ( GMT ) zone in London .
It means that a Modern twelvemonth officially begin aboard the space - based laboratory at 7 p.m. ET ( 4 p.m. PT ) on January 31 , which is midnight UTC / GMT . So as you scan this , it ’s already 2025 aboard the space post !
It ’s true that each crew extremity may need to see in the Modern year grant to the time zone of their home on Earth . But consider the U.S. and Russia have a amount of 17 time zone between them , this could make for oneverylong party .
What commonly happens is that the spaceman select an concord - upon sentence and see up for a jubilation inside one of the post ’s many modules . They ’ll relish some special food treat , though a champagne celebration is out of the question as alcohol is n’t allow on the ISS .
Two astronaut who originally this year never imagined they ’d be in orbit on this extra evening are American spaceman Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore . The twain go far at the ISS in June on the first crewed flight of stairs of the Starliner spacecraft . But several technological issues with the Starliner stand for that for safety reasons , the fomite had to pass home without them . Williams and Wilmore are nowexpected to bring back to Earthaboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon in March . It ’s been quite an escapade for the duad , and seeing in a new year 250 miles above Earth will surely be a memory they ’ll cherish forever .
