Briefly: In addition to NASA celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence aboard the International Space Station (ISS), crew members took thousands of photos of the Earth during 2020. Now the agency has seen the best twenty images of our planet, seen from space.
Selected by the people at the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, the images include Cuba and the Bahamas, the autumn colors of Ottawa and the rising moon over the southern Atlantic Ocean. You can see more photos taken from the ISS here.
NASA has released a series of statistics on the ISS to celebrate its twenty years of constant habitation. 240 individuals from 19 countries, about 260 kilometers above the earth, visited the International Space Station, where an international crew of six people live and work.
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The station travels about five miles per second and orbits the earth about every 90 minutes. It works every 24 hours around 16 orbits of the earth.
The ISS measures 357 feet end-to-end, one yard shorter than a soccer field, including the end zones. The power comes from four pairs of solar power plants that deliver 75 to 90 kilowatts, and it weighs 925,335 pounds with a habitable volume of 13,696 cubic feet.
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Something not mentioned by NASA is that the ashes of James ‘Scotty’ Doohan have traveled on the ISS for the past 12 years. Game developer Richard Garriott, the man behind the Ultima series, smuggled them aboard a laminated photo of the actor when he became one of the first space tourists to visit the station in 2008.
