How do you tell the time on the ISS?

The International Space Station (ISS) flies around Earth at 28,160 kilometres (17,500 miles) per hour, completing each orbit in 90 minutes, which means the crew see 16 stunningly beautiful sunrises and sunsets every 24 hours. This means that the crew can’t use the passing of the Sun to help mark out days, and instead had to pick a time zone. It’s the same time on the ISS as it is in Iceland and Ghana. That’s because the space agencies around the world that built the station decided that it should use Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC.

This is a convenient compromise between the times in Houston and Moscow, the two cities where the two main control centres for the ISS are located, and means that the flight controllers in each country have their days overlapping with half of the crew’s day. Once a new crew arrives at the station, they can simply set their wristwatches to the new time zone, just like you might when travelling, and then settle into their new home up

in the sky. Libby Jackson, human exploration program manager at the UK Space Agency

The ISS experiences many sunrises and sunsets as it orbits Earth Astronomers have observed evidence for favourable conditions under the icy crust of Europa