When Does The New Year Start On The International Space Station?

When Does The New Year Start On The International Space Station?

If you’re on terra firma, it’s pretty obvious when you need to grab your make-out partner. But how do you know when to celebrate “when you’re hurtling through time zones at 28,164km per hour?”

The obvious answer is something like: “you don’t pick a single moment, you celebrate once over each of the 30 different time zones in an all-day, ISS, kegger of space beer blow out.

The actual answer is a little less exciting. The ISS astronauts set their clocks to Coordinated Universal Time, which is the same thing as Greenwich Mean Time, just with a cooler name.

But they still got some time zone-hopping fun: the ISS crew celebrated New Years with mission controllers in Moscow and Houston when the clock struck midnight in those cities. [Slate’s Explainer]


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