Ahmedabad, DeshGujrat

Get ready to see the glimpses of the International Space Station (ISS), commonly known as Space Station, which is flying over Gujarat sky in early evening on Monday from 6.52 pm to 6.58 pm.

It will visible from north-west direction and moving speedily towards south-east direction. This six minutes journey would be just 49 minutes after the Sun set on the western sky on Monday evening. The sun set time on Monday is 6.03 pm. The maximum brightness and visibility would be at 6:55 pm.

All interested and amateur astronomers can see the Space Station in naked eye as a slow-moving, bright white dot due to reflected sunlight, and can be seen in the just 49 minutes after the sunset, when the station remains sunlit but the ground and sky are dark. The Space Station takes about ten minutes to move from one horizon to another, and will only be visible part of that time due to moving into or out of the Earth’s shadow.

Because of the size 110m x 100m x 30m and of its reflective surface area, the Space Station is the brightest man-made object in the sky excluding flares, with an approximate maximum magnitude of −4 when overhead, similar to Venus.

The Space Station flies 400 km high at speeds that defy gravity – literally. At 28 800 km/h it only takes 90 minutes for the weightless laboratory to make a complete circuit of Earth. Astronauts working and living on the Station experience 16 sunrises and sunsets each day.

The Space Station serves as a microgravity and space environment research laboratory in which crew members conduct experiments in biology, human biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology and other fields. The station is suited for the testing of spacecraft systems and equipment required for missions to the Moon and Mars.

Presently six astronauts are on board in Space Station including NASA astronauts Barry Wilmore, commander; Terry Virts, flight engineer, Russian cosmonauts Elena Serova, Alexander Samoukutyaev and Anton Shkaplerov and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti.

India borne American astronaut Sunita Williams holds the record for longest spaceflight by a woman in the International Space Station.

Narottam Sahoo, Scientist, Gujarat Science City said, “we request one and all to look into the evening sky and to catch the glimpses of Space Station in their terrace and open ground.”

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