WASHINGTON: Seventeen years after the launch of the International Space Station (ISS), it has been able to complete its 100,000th orbit around earth. The ISS achieved the record on early Monday morning. For 15 and half years, the ISS has been the human habitation for astronauts from 18 different nations.
The 2.6 billion miles being traveled by ISS are equivalent to 10 round trips to Mars or nearly the journey to Neptune. The first component of the ISS was launched on November 20, 1998. Since then, the orbiting lab has been moving around earth at the speed of 17,500 mph and completing one lap every 90 minutes at an altitude of around 240 miles.
NASA astronaut Je Williams said, “This is a significant milestone and is a tribute to this international partnership, made up of the European Space Agency, of Russia, Canada, Japan and the United States”.
During the ISS’s initial assembly stages, nobody used to live abroad the ISS. The $100 billion orbiting complex has as much living space as a five-bedroom house. Since November 2000, the space has been occupied by rotating astronaut crews.
Generally, a crew comprises of six members and each of them lives aboard the outpost for five to six months at a time. Over the past 15.5 years, a total of 222 people have visited the space station.
According to NASA and its partner agencies view the ISS as an important steppingstone to more distant destinations such as Mars. Over 1,900 experiments have been performed aboard the orbiting lab till date. Many of them have been designed to help researchers and mission planners to know how humanity can push farther out into the solar system. It is being said that NASA and its international partners are thinking to extend the orbiting outpost’s lifetime through 2028.
“The International Space Station has made its 100,000th orbit around the Earth. The orbital station has now traveled about 2.6 billion miles since its launch in 1998, or “roughly the distance between Earth and Neptune” and the “equivalent of about 10 round trips between Earth and Mars at the average distance between the two planets,” NASA said in a statement Monday,” according to a news report published by The Atlantic.
The first components of the ISS were launched in November 1998 as part of a joint construction project of the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada, and members of the European Space Agency. The station was assembled piece by piece, module by module. Today, it’s slightly larger than a football field, and provides the living space of a six-bedroom house. People have lived and worked there continually since 2000. The first crew- two Russian cosmonauts and one American-stayed for four months. The ISS has largely escaped the effects of political disagreements between the U.S. and Russia, making it one of the few places in the universe where Moscow and Washington can agree.
According to a story published on the topic by Fox40, “The International Space Station was built in collaboration by 16 countries – the United States, Canada, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Circling the Earth every 90 minutes, its inhabitants (222 so far) are treated to a spectacular sunrise or sunset every 45 minutes.”
“The biggest technical challenges are biomedical – how to keep astronauts healthy on the way to and back from Mars as well as staying on the surface,” Chiao said. “There are a lot of different things that occur to the human body in space but most importantly once you get out of the Earth’s magnetic atmosphere, you’re exposed to a lot more radiation than you are here on Earth and even the lower atmosphere.” “Bottom line, we as human beings, as as species we love to explore. That’s what we are, its part of the human experience,”
A report published in CNET News revealed, “Thanks to Snapchat and NASA, today we got to live vicariously through International Space Station commander Tim Kopra, tumbling around the Earth in the ISS to celebrate its 100,000th orbit. In a series of short videos, he talks about life in microgravity, and the astronauts’ activities aboard the space station.”
The ISS is primarily a microgravity and space research laboratory, and inhabitants in recent years have been conducting experiments in growing plants, fire, 3D printing and fluid dynamics. It also allows researchers to examine the effects of microgravity living on the human body.
