International Space Station Completes Its 100,000th Orbit of Earth

The International Space Station (ISS) just reached a milestone, completing its 100,000th orbit of Earth on Monday morning, May 16.

This success was 17 and a half years in the making. NASA said the length of this journey is similar to traveling more than 2.6 billion miles. That is equivalent to 10 round trips to Mars or nearly the distance to Neptune, as per the Washington Post.

It takes about 90 minutes to complete each orbit, with 16 orbits comprising one station day.

In a video posted by NASA Johnson, it said nearly 2,000 research investigations have been done on the station and more than 1,200 scientific results have been produced and published from the voyage.

The ISS has been home to several astronauts since 2000. The 250-mile-high space station was launched in November 1998 and is the largest artificial body in orbit that can be seen with a naked eye from Earth.

Since the beginning of its operations, 222 people have visited or lived in the space station from different countries, representing different space agencies from the United States, Russia, Europe, Canada and Japan.

There are currently six crew members living aboard the space station, which includes two Americans, one Englishman and three Russians. They are NASA astronauts Jeff Williams and Timothy Kopra, Britain's Tim Peake, and Russia's Yury Malenchenko, Oleg Skripochka and Alexey Ovchinin.

These astronauts and cosmonauts also recently achieved a milestone, with the 3 millionth photo taken from the ISS.

In a celebratory video posted by NASA, Williams, a flight engineer, said: "This is a significant milestone and is a tribute to this international partnership made up of the European Space Agency, of Russia, Canada, Japan and the United States."

He added that this achievement is a tribute to all the teams that work hard on all the programs of the space station, keeping the astronauts and cosmonauts safe in orbit.

As per Phys.org, the space station is expected to remain in orbit until 2024, after the participating countries except the European Union agreed to continue funding it until then.

Williams ended the video saying, "100,000 orbits, the journey continues."