Flying at a the speed of 28,000 km/h at altitude of about 400 km, orbiting the Earth in 92 minutes, the Space Station is a cutting-edge research facility and a symbol of a peaceful international cooperation, with a great cultural significance recognised in many forms of art and culture.
The ESA ISS Tracker, developed by Iacopo Baroncini of ESA’s Directorate of Human and Robotic Exploration, allows anyone to track the Station in real-time.
In the past 6 years, it has become the most popular ESA’s outreach digital asset on the internet by far. With its precise tracking capabilities, and simple and beautiful graphic design, it is publicly accessible from an ESA server, and embedded in many web pages around the world.
Selected by NASA in late 2014, the ESA ISS Tracker is integral part of their High Definition Earth-view System (HDEV) web page, which provides the famous live forward view from the ISS, from an external camera mounted on Harmony (Node 2).
Regularly used world-wide by many institutions as well as general public, it has been viewed about 350 million times since 2014:
- 30 million times from the ESA web page Where is the International Space Station?
- 318 million times from the NASA High Definition Earth-view System
That makes an average of about 160,000 views per day!