Clear skies over the Shotley peninsula tonight will offer a five minute glimpse of the International Space Station (ISS) travelling overhead.

The ISS will appear at 7:48pm, 90 minutes after sunset, 10° looking towards west and will disappear 31° above east.

According to wearer forecasters, tonight will be dry with clear skies throughout. It will be a chilly night but most places will remain frost-free.

It would appear even joint project between Russia, America, Canada, Japan and several European countries, is not above political symbolism.

Russian cosmonauts Denis Matveyev, Oleg Artemyev and Sergey Korsakov were seen wearing the yellow and blue widely associated with Ukraine, and those opposed to the Russian invasion.

The trio docked at the ISS after a three-hour flight which blasted off from a Russian-owned facility in Kazakhstan.

The standard-issue Russian uniform is plain blue, and at least one of the men was seen wearing this before take-off.

The moment was live-streamed by both Roscosmos and Nasa, the American space agency.

TheISS serves as a home where crews of astronauts and cosmonauts live. and orbits Earth at an average altitude of approximately 250 miles travelling at 17,500 mph.

This means it orbits Earth every 90 minutes. NASA is using the space station to learn more about living and working in space. These lessons will make it possible to send humans farther into space than ever before.

The first piece of the International Space Station was launched in November 1998. A Russian rocket launched the Russian Zarya (zar EE uh) control module. About two weeks later, the space shuttle Endeavour met Zarya in orbit. The space shuttle was carrying the U.S. Unity node. The crew attached the Unity node to Zarya.

More pieces were added over the next two years before the station was ready for people to live there. The first crew arrived on November 2, 2000. People have lived on the space station ever since. More pieces have been added over time. NASA and its partners from around the world completed construction of the space station in 2011.

According to NASA, the space station has the volume of a five-bedroom house or two Boeing 747 jetliners. It is able to support a crew of six people, plus visitors.

On Earth, the space station would weigh almost a million pounds. Measured from the edges of its solar arrays, the station covers the area of a football field including the end zones. It includes laboratory modules from the United States, Russia, Japan and Europe.

At the end of October 2020, 240 people from 19 countries have been on the International Space Station. More than 2,800 experiments have been conducted in space.

NASA currently is working on a plan to explore other worlds. The space station is one of the first steps. NASA will use lessons learned on the space station to prepare for human missions that reach farther into space than ever before.