Astronauts welcome the New Year 2020 in space

People living on Earth aren't the only ones counting down the time to welcome the New Year 2020 at midnight. Six orbiting explorers also celebrated the arrival of the new year, and a new decade, on the international spacecraft.

"Happy New Year from Earth's orbit!" , NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan wrote on Twitter when the earth began in 2020.

Six Expedition 60 astronauts on the International Space Station held an early 2020 celebration.

Morgan celebrated the festival in 2020 with crews Christina Koch and Jessica Meir (NASA), astronauts of the European Space Agency Luca Parmitano, and Russian astronauts Oleg Skripochka and Alexander Skvortsov. Astronaut Luca Parmitano is the captain of the crew called Expedition 60 .

Celebrating a new year in space is a little different than on Earth. For starters, the astronauts orbit the Earth 16 times a day, meaning they see 16 sunrises and sunsets when the planetary circle is every hour and a half. Then they got their time zone, which means the station's crew saw the arrival of 2020 before the controllers at NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston.

2020 is an important milestone for the International Space Station. In November, the station will celebrate 20 years of continuous operation in the presence of humans. The first Expedition 1 station crew arrived here in 2000.

Expected, SpaceX and Boeing are expected to begin sending astronauts to fly to space station for NASA on commercial spacecraft. In January, SpaceX's crew will conduct a test as part of that work.

Meanwhile, Christina Koch has set a new record for a woman's longest space flight and is continuing to break this record as she has been spending nearly a year in space (to be exact). 328 days).