The International Space Station (ISS) is moving at 7.66 km/s about 408 km above Earth, and this page shows where it is right now. The live ISS tracker updates every second with the current location of the station — latitude, longitude, altitude, velocity and the region it is passing over — calculated from NORAD two-line element (TLE) orbital data using the SGP4 model.
The ISS is a crewed modular space station operated jointly by NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA and CSA, catalogued as NORAD 25544. It has been continuously inhabited since November 2000 and completes one orbit of Earth every 92 minutes — about 15.5 orbits per day.
Its orbit is inclined 51.6° to the equator, so the ground track sweeps between 51.6° north and 51.6° south and passes over every major Indian city. The ISS is bright enough to see with the naked eye: during twilight passes it looks like a steady, non-blinking white light crossing the sky in three to six minutes. Positions on this page are estimates from orbital propagation, not live GPS from the spacecraft.
Live ISS coordinates — the latitude and longitude of the point on Earth directly below the station — update every second on this page, alongside the current altitude (about 408 km) and velocity (7.66 km/s, roughly 27,600 km/h). At that speed the ISS covers about 4 degrees of longitude every minute. When the ground track is not over India, the page also gives the time the station next crosses Indian longitudes.
Knowing where the ISS is does not tell you when you can see it. This page calculates every visible ISS pass over the next 48 hours for your city, giving the start time in IST, the compass direction to face, the maximum height above the horizon in degrees, the peak brightness in magnitude and how long the pass lasts. A pass is only listed when the station clears 10 degrees elevation, is lit by the Sun and crosses while your sky is dark — the same optical test used on the satellites visible tonight pages. Each pass can be added to a phone calendar with a reminder ten minutes before it starts.
Yes, regularly. The ISS passes over Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Pune, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow and every other Indian city. Best viewing is 30 to 60 minutes after sunset or before sunrise, when the station is still sunlit but the sky below is dark. At its brightest the ISS reaches magnitude -3 to -4, outshining every star and planet except the Moon and Venus. Whether it is visible on a given night is answered by the pass list for your city.
Three conditions must hold at once for a visible pass: the ISS has to be above your horizon, your sky has to be dark, and the station has to be sunlit. Look for a steady white light crossing the sky in three to six minutes with no blinking and no coloured navigation lights — that is how you tell it from an aircraft. If it fades out halfway across rather than setting, it has flown into Earth's shadow.
The ISS is the largest structure humans have ever put in orbit, measuring 109 by 73 metres and massing around 420,000 kg. It serves as a microgravity research laboratory for astrobiology, astronomy, meteorology, physics and materials science, and as a testbed for the spacecraft systems needed for missions to the Moon and Mars. Its international designator is 1998-067A.
Earth rotates underneath the ISS orbit, so each successive lap crosses the equator about 22.5 degrees further west. That is why the ISS route drawn on a map looks like a westward-drifting sine wave rather than a fixed repeating loop, and why the station does not pass over the same city on consecutive orbits.
NASA runs a continuous live stream from a camera mounted on the outside of the station, looking down at Earth from about 408 km up, and this page embeds that official feed. Press play to start it — the player is not loaded until you ask for it. When the crew is on duty the broadcast switches to interior views with mission audio, and NASA's channel also carries live coverage of spacewalks, Crew Dragon and Soyuz dockings and cargo arrivals. The picture is dark while the station is on the night side of each 92-minute orbit, and a blue screen means a short loss of signal while the station hands over between relay satellites.