TAMPA, Florida.- The astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) will fly over the Tampa (Florida) stadium this Sunday where Super Bowl LV will be played and, in addition, four of them will break a record of permanence that day in space, over 84 days established in 1974.
The orbital trajectory of the ISS will take it to the stadium in Tampa, a city on the west coast of Florida, at 7.15 pm (00.15 GMT on Monday), the US space agency NASA detailed this Friday.
The astronauts will thus fly over the American football final to be held at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa between the Buccaneers of that Florida city and the Chiefs of Kansas City.
AP
It is the most important sporting event on the annual calendar in the United States, which this year will have a small audience, following strict security protocols due to Covid-19.
A new record
NASA also noted that four SpaceX Crew astronauts living aboard the ISS will beat the US record for days in space for a crew launched aboard a US spacecraft on Sunday.
In this way, the four will exceed the 84 days that the Skylab 4 crew remained in 1974.
NASA recalled that Expedition 64 flight engineers Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi docked the “Resilience” SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft to the ISS on November 16.
Its crew will surpass the time of Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson and William Pogue, who docked the Apollo to the Skylab space station 47 years after the day “Resilience” docked in the orbiting laboratory.
The agency stressed that the visit to the Super Bowl represents a break for four astronauts from NASA and one from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) after a “busy” start to the year.
He recalled that the quintet was busy packing up Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus space freighter and SpaceX Cargo Dragon in January and monitoring their departures.
Then Hopkins and Glover had a couple of spacewalks to upgrade the communications and power systems.
During that period, research in microgravity raced forward, exploring from life sciences to space physics and advanced technology demonstrations.
Meanwhile, in the Russian segment of the station, Commander Sergey Ryzhikov repaired exercise and video communications equipment.
Flight engineer Sergey Kud-Sverchkov installed and activated the Earth observation hardware and helped his compatriot with maintenance of the Zvezda service module treadmill.
.
