According to the website space.com, the astronauts on-board the space station are spending Christmas Day weightlessly floating around inside the station, with the station whizzing around the Earth at 17,500 miles-per-hours (28,000 kilometers-per-hour). The first Christmas in space, for people from Earth, occurred on December 21, 1968, when astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders blasted off from Cape Kennedy on a Saturn V rocket.
For the current team of astronauts, the festivities include opening gifts, which were delivered earlier this month by a Japanese cargo supply ship. After a work session, the astronauts will enjoy some festive-themed ready-meals. In addition, astronauts on-board the space station do not not normally work on Sundays and, as a bonus, they’ve been given Monday (December 26) off as well by NASA.
To mark the day, NASA have released images of life on-board the station:
And some spectacular deep-space images of what the cosmos looks like on Christmas Day:
According to The Daily Mirror, which has reproduced some of the images. “although there are no seasons in space, this cosmic vista invokes thoughts of a frosty winter landscape.”
The picture below shows the dwarf planet Pluto (a false-color image):
To make the colorful video, NASA combined photos by the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA).
