The ISS or the International Space Station, which is the farthest human inhabited outpost of mankind, has just completed an important landmark 100, 000th orbit of Earth.
It has travelled 2,643,342,240 miles which are the distance equivalent to 10 trips to Mars or almost equivalent to the distance to the planet Neptune.
The ISS is a truly international effort and has been in orbit for almost 17 years now and contains modules from the NASA, Japanese Space Agency, European Space Agency and Russia.
The ISS has been visited by more than 222 people of different ethnicity. The ISS is at present travelling at a breakneck speed of 17,500 miles (28,000 kilometres) per hour at an altitude of 400 kilometres. It completes one orbit of Earth in 90 minutes.
The 100,000 orbit of the Earth by the ISS lasted from 7:35 am to 9:10 am Moscow time (0435 to 0610 GMT), mission control said.
International Space Station Marks 100,000 Orbits of Earth
US flight engineer Jeff Williams, who is on his third mission aboard the ISS, share the honours with Russian Cosmonauts Yury Malenchenko, Alexey Ovchinin and Oleg Skripochka and fellow NASA astronauts astronaut Timothy Kopra, Britain’s Tim Peake.
The ISS is divided into modules which have been built by different Space Agencies. The first module of the ISS station called Zarya or Dawn in Russian was the first to be launched more than 17 years ago on November 20, 1998.
The ISS has been continuously inhabited since 2000 when the first crew comprising of American astronaut Bill Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko arrived.
From two modules the ISS has expanded and today it has m15 modules and the space station is as big as a football pitch and more than $100 billion have been invested in the project.
Since the end of the US Space Shuttle program, the burden of ferrying Astronauts and Cosmonauts has fallen on the Russians from its Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
