NASA shows the best images of the Earth taken from the ISS this year

In letter: In addition to NASA’s celebration of 20 years of continued human presence aboard the International Space Station (ISS), crew members took thousands of photos of Earth in 2020. Now the agency has unveiled the best twenty images of our planet as seen from space.

Chosen by the folks at NASA’s Johnson Space Center’s Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, the images include Cuba and the Bahamas, Ottawa’s fall colors, and the moon’s rising over the South Atlantic. You can view more photos taken from the ISS here.

NASA has released a series of statistics about the ISS to celebrate its twenty years of continuous occupation. At about 260 miles above Earth, 240 people from 19 countries have visited the International Space Station, where an international crew of six lives and works.

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The station travels at a speed of five miles per second and orbits the Earth approximately every 90 minutes. That equates to 16 orbits around the Earth every 24 hours.

The ISS itself measures 357 feet from end to end, a meter shorter than a football field, including the end zones. Its power comes from four pairs of solar panels that deliver 75 to 90 kilowatts, and it weighs 925,335 pounds with a habitable volume of 13,696 cubic feet.

Something NASA doesn’t mention is that James ‘Scotty’ Doohan’s ashes have traveled on the ISS for the past 12 years. Game developer Richard Garriott, the man behind the Ultima series, smuggled them in a laminated photo of the actor when he became one of the first space tourists to visit the station in 2008.