The International Space Station will make an unusually bright pass over Honolulu Thursday evening if the weather cooperates.
The space station will rise in the southwest at 6:49 p.m. and head toward the top of the sky. It will pass to the left of Mars at 6:51 p.m. and reach its highest point about 90 seconds later inside the square of Pegasus.
It will drop to the right of the constellation Cassiopeia and to the left of a nearly full moon, then blink out of sight at 6:54 p.m. above the northeast horizon.
The space station is visible when it is illuminated by the sun against a dark sky just after sunset or just before sunrise.
It is currently 268 miles up and moving at 4.76 miles per second.
Aboard are two Americans, Navy Capt. Barry E. "Butch" Wilmore, the mission commander, and Air Force Col. Terry Virts; three Russians, air force Col. Anton Shkaplerov, air force Lt. Col. Alexander Samokutyaev and engineer Elena Serova; and an Italian, rocket scientist Samantha Cristoforetti.
On Wednesday, Wilmore and Virts replaced filters and checked for leaks on the carbon dioxide removal assembly, which removes humidity and carbon dioxide from the station’s air.
Cristoforetti was in Europe’s Columbus lab module cleaning the BioLab, which allows the observation of micro-organisms, plants and invertebrates and their adaptation to microgravity.
The cosmonauts gathered in Japan’s Kibo lab module to record a televised event in between their regularly duties, according to NASA.
The next bright space station pass over Honolulu will be on Dec. 27, according to the website heavens-above.com.
In addition, there will be an extremely bright flare from an Iridium satellite between 6:13 and 6:14 p.m. Monday. Sunlight will bounce off the shiny antennas of the Iridium 61 satellite as it passes near the top of the sky, near the northeast corner of the square of Pegasus.
