This 12 months’s summer time solstice for the northern hemisphere arrives at 11:54 a.m. EDT, that means at the moment is the longest day of the 12 months! The variety of daylight varies by latitude, so our headquarters in Washington, D.C. will see 14 hours, 53 minutes, and 51 seconds of daylight. Loads can occur in that point! Let’s discover out extra.
If you happen to’re spending the day exterior, you may be within the path of our Earth Science Satellite tv for pc Fleet (ESSF)! The fleet, made up of over a dozen Earth observation satellites, will move over the continental United States about 37 occasions throughout at the moment’s daylight.
These missions accumulate knowledge on atmospheric chemistry and composition, cloud cowl, ocean ranges, local weather, ecosystem dynamics, precipitation, and glacial motion, amongst different issues. They goal to do all the pieces from predicting excessive climate to serving to informing the general public and resolution makers with the surroundings by way of GPS and imaging. In the present day, their sensors will ship again over 200 gigabytes (GB) of knowledge again to the bottom by sundown.
Because the solar units at the moment, the Worldwide House Station (ISS) shall be finishing its tenth orbit since dawn. In that point, slightly greater than 1 terabyte-worth of knowledge shall be downlinked to Earth.
That quantity encompasses knowledge from floor communications, payloads, experiments, and management and navigation alerts for the station. Roughly 330 GB of that TB is video, together with stay broadcasts and downlinks with information retailers. However as recently-returned astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor likes to level out, there’s nonetheless room for enjoyable. The astronauts aboard the ISS can request YouTube movies or films for what she likes to name “household film night time.”
Astronauts aboard the station additionally ship again photographs—LOTS of them. Final 12 months, astronauts despatched again a mean of 66,912 photographs per thirty days! Throughout at the moment’s lengthy hours of daylight, we anticipate the crew to ship again about 656 photographs. However with Expedition 59 astronauts David Saint-Jacques (CSA), Anne McClain (NASA), and Oleg Kononenko (RKA) laborious at work making ready to return to Earth on Monday, that quantity may be rather less.
Say you’re feeling neglected after seeing the household dinners and need to be part of the crew. Would you might have sufficient daylight to journey to the ISS and again on the longest day of the 12 months? Sure, however provided that you’re speedy sufficient, and plan your launch excellent. With the present quickest launch-to-docking time of about six hours, you possibly can full two-and-a-half flights to the ISS at the moment between dawn and sundown.
When getting back from orbit, it’s an extended ordeal. After the Expedition 59 trio arrives on Earth Monday night time, they’ll need to journey from Kazakhstan to Houston to start their post-flight actions. Their journey ought to take about 18 hours and half-hour, just some hours longer than the hours of daylight we’ll see at the moment.
Completely happy solstice! Be certain to tune in with us on Monday night time for live coverage of the return of Expedition 59. Till then, benefit from the longest day of the 12 months!
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