Just Look Up: How to Track the International Space Station

Have you ever looked up at the sky at dawn or dusk and seen a bright spot moving rapidly across the sky? It’s not a new star shifting out of order. You’ve probably just seen the International Space Station (ISS).

At 357 feet long, the ISS is a football field-sized orbital microgravity center, solar-powered research laboratory, training facility, and observatory. It’s moving at 17,500 miles per hour, 250 miles overhead, and orbiting the earth every 90 minutes. If it’s hard to imagine how fast that is, the top speed for an airplane is 575 miles per hour.

Contrary to popular belief, the ISS isn’t the first place humans have ever lived outside of planet Earth (that was NASA’s Skylab(Opens in a new window)that orbited the earth from 1973 to 1979), but it is a crucial step towards human space exploration and future habitats of our species on other planets.

If you want to know how to track the ISS, you’ve come to the right place. How to view NASA’s interactive map and sign up for email or text alerts for the best time to look up.

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Spot the Station: How to find the ISS online

If you want to watch the ISS from home, go to Spot The Station(Opens in a new window) and use the interactive map to find observation opportunities near you. There is also the Live Space Station Tracking Map(Opens in a new window)which shows the physical position of the satellite over the earth.

Potential sightings are marked on the map by blue pins. I live in Los Angeles, so the closest blue pin on the map is northeast of the city, high up in the San Gabriel Mountains at Mount Baldy.

Location map for sightings (Credit: Spot the Station)

You can select a blue pin and click on it View sighting opportunities Link to see when the ISS was visible from this location. The data is accurate, showing the exact day, time, altitude and duration of the ISS sighting in minutes. NASA also provides links to share any potential sighting opportunity via Facebook and Twitter.

All sightings occur within a few hours before or after sunrise or sunset. This is the optimal observing time as the Sun reflects off the space station and stands out against the darker sky. Before setting off for a single point, it’s worth noting that the ISS must be over 40 degrees from the horizon in the night sky or you won’t see anything.

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Sign up for notifications

You can also sign up for notifications(Opens in a new window). press the registration button in the Alerts section and enter your approximate location by selecting and clicking a blue pin on the map Sign up for this location.

Choose whether you want email or text notifications, then enter your email address or carrier and your number. Select whether you want AM or PM notification times, check the boxes so you can agree to the terms, and click Submit. NASA requires a double opt-in for their notification service. Once you have provided the above information, you will be given an 8-digit code (so keep an eye out for it).

Once your code has arrived, return to the login page and look at the Enter Code section on the right side of the screen. Enter your email address or number and add the code that was sent to you. click process code to complete the registration process.

The website will then confirm that your notifications are active. Check that all dates are correct, with your preferred location (ie mine is Mount Baldy as it is closest to Los Angeles). This page also gives you the current month’s sighting options in your local time zone.

NASA will then notify you when the ISS is near you and in optimal viewing conditions.

If you’ve opted in to receive emails, don’t forget to add [email protected] to your contacts so you can avoid the notifications going to your spam folder. Your notifications will continue to be sent to your phone or inbox for a year. After that you have to log in again.

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Who is on the ISS now?

The seven-man crew of Expedition 68 (Source: NASA)

How is life on board the ISS? We interviewed astronaut Nicole Stott during NatGeo’s press tour in 2018 A strange rock(Opens in a new window). She told us about her 27-year career at NASA, where she spent 104 days in space and performed a six-hour, 39-minute spacewalk before returning to Earth on the Space Shuttle Discovery’s final descent.

Who’s up there now? There are seven astronauts on board at the time of writing(Opens in a new window)including Nicole A. Mann, NASA’s first Indigenous woman to fly into space.

There are also robots on board the ISS. These Astrobee robots were designed to track radiation levels, help with two-way communications with mission control on Earth, and avoid astronauts conducting experiments. As of April 2022, the Astrobee program had “spent over 750 hours on the space station and conducted over 100 activities, from technical demonstrations to experiment support,” NASA says(Opens in a new window).

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Scientific Exploration

The European robotic arm from the multipurpose laboratory module Nauka (Credit: NASA)

If you’re an optimist, the ISS is welcome evidence that we can all play well together when we share common goals — such as the future of life itself. According to the ISS National Laboratory(Opens in a new window)240 people from 19 countries visited the station, which has hosted more than 3,000 research investigations by researchers from more than 100 countries.

No spoiler alert, but in about 5 billion years our sun will die(Opens in a new window), so our descendants must be long gone by then. To explore the known universe, we need to figure out how to equip humans for (very) long journeys and learn how to survive in (extremely) hostile environments. The ISS serves as a microgravity testbed for technologies that make this possible.

One of these experiments is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS)(Opens in a new window), a 7.5-ton module containing the first precision particle physics detector in space. We have previously spoken to Dr. Samuel Ting, the scientist responsible for the AMS, to find out how it “scoured space”, modeled billions of cosmic rays and searched for evidence of dark matter to uncover the origins of the universe.

other experiments(Opens in a new window) Conducted on the ISS range from biological and biotechnological investigations, through space science (such as experimental chrondule formation or “stardust”) to evidence-based human research, including identifying genetic predispositions to physical changes in microgravity environments.

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International Relations

SpaceX Crew-5 Mission Specialist Anna Kikina of Roscosmos (Credit: NASA)

The ISS was set up in situ – i.e. above the earth’s atmosphere. The first module launched on November 20, 1998 and the first crew rose on October 31, 2000. Since its inception, 16 countries have been involved in collaboration with five space agencies – CSA (Canada), ESA (Europe), JAXA (Japan), Roscosmos (Russia) and NASA (USA).

At a time of heightened conflicts between major players on Earth, it is remarkable that all involved manage to move beyond such disputes and largely get on with the task at hand. However, Russia will exit the ISS sometime this decade, and China is currently building its own space station.

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Space Tourism: Life after the ISS

Blue Origin NS-22 (Image credit: Blue Origin)

Sadly, the ISS itself will be decommissioned in 2030, so it’s worth observing it in the night sky at least once before it leaves.

While not a quick read, NASA’s transition plan provides details(Opens in a new window) how the station will be developed for commercial use in the future, taking “steps to develop both the supply and demand sides of the commercial economy in low Earth orbit, and the technical steps and budget required for the transition are”.

For those of us who long to be space tourists and not just see space stations from the ground, the interim report confirms that NASA has signed agreements with Blue Origin, Nanoracks LLC and Northrop Grumman to develop commercial targets in space .

Until then, look up and imagine what life will be like when we can all go into Low Earth Orbit – and then where no man has gone before, brave or not.