Astronauts Ready For Super Bowl LIX?

On 9 February (Sunday), across the United States and around the world, Americans and American football fans will tune in to watch the top two teams in the National Football League (NFL) go head-to-head in the ultimate post-season game, and even astronauts living in space will have the chance to watch the action live.

Sunday evening, the American Football Conference (AFC) champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, will face off against the National Football Conference (NFC) champions, the Philadelphia Eagles, in Super Bowl LIX. Kickoff for the big matchup is scheduled for 6:30 P.M. ET (2330 GMT), with coverage provided by the Fox Broadcasting Company.

Many Americans will gather at watch parties and sports bars to cheer on their favorite team, contribute to the consumption of an estimated 1.4 billion chicken wings, and exercise general merriment for the occasion. And the watch parties don't have to be limited to Earth.

NASA will be providing a live uplink of the Super Bowl to the International Space Station (ISS), should the astronauts onboard "choose to stay up to watch it," a Johnson Space Center official told Space.com. For them, it will be extra late at night.

An astronaut's day aboard the ISS is not attuned to any time zone in the United States. The "international" in "International Space Station," means that astronauts of multiple nationalities are normally working aboard the space station together, and need to coordinate with mission control teams on opposite sides of the planet.

Another reason lies in the fact that the space station experiences a new sunrise every 45 minutes as it orbits the planet at 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour), so basing you sleep cycle on what daylight peeps through the station's windows would obviously be chaos.

As such, the ISS operates on Coordinated Universal Time, UTC, also known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). This puts NASA astronauts aboard the station 5-6 hours ahead of mission control in Houston, Texas (depending on Daylight Savings Time). So, for any of NASA's astronaut cohort on orbit to watch the game, kickoff isn't actually until 11:30 P.M.