Space dwellers experience multiple “midnights” on their daily orbit around the International Space Station .
What are the main hours for your celebration?
December is almost over and with it the whole of 2022: the whole world celebrates the arrival of the New Year with new opportunities to achieve their goals.
But there are not only humans on our planet, but also in space. The International Space Station (ISS) currently has 7 crew members who also celebrate terrestrial traditions and a question falls ripe: What time do they celebrate the New Year ?
It’s not that hard to figure it out
The inhabitants of the ISS fly in a spacecraft that circles the Earth at about 27,600 km/h, so that, every day, they pass through multiple time zones.
To wait for midnight on December 31, astronauts set their watches to GMT, also known as Coordinated Universal Time. That means they will officially ring in the New Year with those in London, Reykjavik and Accra.
His New Year , in Peruvian time, is at 7 pm on January 31.
Currently, the ship’s crew is Expedition 68 made up of NASA astronaut Frank Rubio; Roscosmos cosmonaut Dmitri Petelin; Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata; NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann; and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Anna Kikina.
Celebrations in Chinese orbit
But there will also now be scientists on another ship: the current Chinese Tiangong space station .
For this year it will be the taikonauts Fei Junlong, a veteran, and the rookies Deng Qingming and Zhang Lu, who will spend the celebration in orbit.
For them, Chinese time rules, supposedly: GMT+8. This means that your New Year will be celebrated 13 hours earlier than in Peru: at 11 a.m. on the 31st.
In 2022, the crew hosted a live video call and interacted with college students at locations in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Macao.
However, the Chinese New Year will be celebrated later, from January 22, 2023. This year, for the February 1 start of the Chinese New Year of the Tiger, they decorated the space station and sent best wishes to people in earth for a happy and prosperous new year.