As the clock strikes midnight, 12, people across the world will sink in the celebration of the New Year in their different time zones. But have you ever wondered, what time the astronauts of the International Space Station (ISS) will celebrate the arrival of the New Year?
The astronauts aboard the International Space Station hail from countries with different time zones. As they come from all over the world– from the United States to Japan, it looks intriguing what time zone is followed by the astronauts to celebrate New Year.
The ISS crews, who are whizzing around the Earth about 400 kilometers above its surface, complete an orbit of the Earth at a speed of around 7.6 kilometers per second. It means that the ISS orbits the Earth 16 times in a day. Consequently, the ISS astronauts travel through 16 sunrises and sunsets.
Astronauts’s time to celebrate New Year
According to the report published by The Indian Express, the ISS crew follows Universal Coordinated Time, which means Greenwich Mean Time. So, the onboard ISS astronauts will celebrate New Year at 5.30 am India Standard Time on January 1, 2023. The Universal Coordinated Time runs one hour behind Central European Time and five-and-a-half hours behind Indian time.
Why 5.30am time zone chosen?
It was selected as the de facto standard time zone for the ISS astronauts as it is considered to be around the mid-point for all ISS partners.
Here are ISS astronauts
There are seven crew members aboard ISS: (1) NASA astronaut Frank Rubio; (2) Roscosmos cosmonaut Dmitri Petelin; (3) Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata; (4) NASA astronaut Josh Cassada, (5) NASA astronaut Nicole Mann; (6) Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and (7) Anna Kikina.