The International Space Station recently completed its 100 000th orbit. Its first component was launched waay back in 1998, a duration of 18 years! It is the ninth such orbiting space station, and has been continuously occupied by a crew for 16 years. It has been visited by astronauts from 17 different nations. During the space shuttle era, space shuttles were used to transport men and women to and from the ISS. However, since the abandonment of the space shuttle in 2011, the Soyuz rocket is the primary method used to take up astronauts. The ISS is 72.8 m long, 108.5 m wide and about 20 m high. It weighs about 420 tonnes and completes an orbit of the Earth in about 93 minutes, orbiting the Earth at a height of about 410 km. The ISS is intended to be a research facility; many experiments are conducted on the ISS. One of the most famous experiments was that of Scott Kelly’s “Year in Space”, which was designed to test the effects of micro-gravity on the human body over a long duration of time. I’m going to leave you with some of the best pictures taken from the International Space Station:
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