23
The official time zone is GMT, or UTC.
As for the number of times they could celebrate, well, that's a bit tricky. The station goes towards the east, which is actually backward in time. There are a total of 38 time zones (Yikes!), spread from UTC +14 to UTC -12. Of course, the ISS would have to be in that particular time zone. The max is likely around 16-...
15
I was interested in the bonus question and decided to do an ad-hoc survey using ISS Tracker in historical mode. I entered the appropriate 2020-01-01 00:00:00 for each apparently relevant time zone (-11 through +13 and the likely half-hour time zones I could find--less than all 38).
My analysis shows that the ISS astronauts could have celebrated one and a ...
8
Tidal forces come from gradients in gravitational fields.
Along the horizontal axis of the station, the distance to Earth stays the same, so there's no gradient and therefore no tidal forces.
To find the gradient along the vertical axis, we can simply use the derivative.
$$\left(\frac{\mu}{r^2}\right)' = -\frac{2\mu}{r^3}$$
At the the orbital radius of ...
6
Using the blue rails, you could stand at attention easily, using your foot and ankle muscles.
But for the more interesting case, you could absolutely stand still at attention in the ISS without touching the sides*
(* for a short period of time)
To expand on this a little - assuming you want to do this in a gap between the ISS's thrusters firing, you ...
5
The case of failed docking of Soyuz MS-14 may fit to constraints of the question. It was in orbit near ISS for 3 days between failed docking attempt and successful attempt. The linked above Wikipedia article states
the spacecraft backed away to a safe distance from the ISS
Further research resulted in locating few news articles mentioning that ...
5
Each of the eight power channels originally shipped with six Nickel-Hydrogen Battery ORUs (Orbital Replacement Units), making 48 battery ORUs. These are gradually being replaced with Lithium Ion Battery ORUs, at a ratio of 1:2. Six channels have been completed to date, making the total number of active batteries 30 as of the date of this answer. By the ...
5
According to this source (in Russian), out of seven successful Salyut stations (amongst which were the three military Almaz stations) the modified NR-23 cannon was installed only on Salyut-3 (aka Almaz-2):
The only prototype of such an installation was mounted at the Almaz-2 station, also known as Salyut-3.
The above statement indirectly assumes that MIR ...
5
To Answer your question:
How many spacecraft deployed from the ISS have escaped Earth orbit?
None
Are there plans for any in the near future?
No
A short proof:
Public Sat-Catalog here
You can search by "International Designator = 1998-067" and filter "On-Orbit" you will get every known object released (intentionally or not) by the ISS an the ISS ...
5
After spending several evenings and going through many dozens of web pages whilst searching for the answer to this question, I couldn't find any definitive claims or quotes that would suggest that such an ability (to regularly place objects at rest on ISS) is common.
In this regard, I believe that it would be very hard to obtain a definitive answer in any ...
4
There are six types of water on the ISS (nothing on the ISS is simple!)
Note that the potable water has minerals added "for taste".
The shuttle water system added iodine to its potable water by running fuel cell product water through a microbial filter. Minerals were not added to the shuttle potable water.
The US iodinated water and the Russian silver-...
3
NASA astronaut Clayton C. Anderson
In his Quora answer describes displaced (by the air flow) chain/medal:
In a micro-gravity environment, things can get lost. I had a chain/St. Christopher's medal, given to me by Sunita Williams' mother before I launched, that I lost while "showering" one morning. Turns out I found it near air vent (inlet) where the air ...
2
The first Orbital Cygnus mission that eventually docked with the ISS experienced GPS issues during its initial berthing procedure. The Cygnus aborted the berthing and retreated to a safe-ish distance from the ISS while Orbital engineers devised a software fix, initially planned for a two day delay. But then NASA asked Orbital for an even longer delay due to ...
2
Update:
This is not direct answer to the question as asked (thanks to @ruakh for pointing this out in the comments), but rather a supplementary answer that outlines another gravitational factor that would affect motion of an object at rest inside ISS.
According to This NASA article, an object would move inside ISS due to the mutual gravitational force ...
2
The SGP4 propagator does not actually use the day of year (just time since epoch), thus a value beyond 366 is just fine. Some people may add some checks to a TLE to raise this as an error, but the propagator itself would see no problem in it. Also, if you want to see how much "time since epoch" is there between the TLE epoch and a given date, you might get ...
2
This news article (in Russian) describes a study conducted on ISS cosmonauts:
In order to study "cosmic illusions", a large-scale experiment was conducted by Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences, during which the pre- and post-flight state of cosmonauts' body was examined, and everything that happened was recorded on the ISS ...
2
One thing should be emphasized: unlike an airplane, the rotation of the ISS is intentionally set at one rotation per revolution, so its solar panels are facing the Sun most of the time. Both the rotation and the revolution are usually adjusted every time it has to dock with another spacecraft.
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