Will the astronauts aboard the ISS see the eclipse?

The International Space Station (ISS) will be on the the day side of Earth three times during the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024 making it possible for astronauts will to experience the eclipse. But they'll be seeing it the way most of North America will see it, as a partial solar eclipse. At least that's what the math says right now but that could change.

The ISS has lots of windows. Ask any astronaut what their favorite thing to do aboard the station is, and they'll say "look out the window". Most of those windows are looking down on Earth, what NASA refers to as the nadir side of the station.  The best view in the house is in the cupola, the 10 foot wide, 2 ton module installed on nadir side the ISS in 2010 that added 7 large windows.

Astronauts use the cupola to take photographs of the Earth and space beyond the Earth's limb, but most of space, including the Sun which will be high in the sky during the eclipse, is under their feet, hidden by the station.

They will be able to see a shadow that appears several states wide as it moves through Mexico, into Texas, through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and finally Maine before crossing over the Canadian Maritime provinces before exiting out into the Atlantic Ocean and ending before reaching Europe.

Looking at the ISS's path during the 3.5 hours the Moon will pass in front of the Sun, the station will be on the daylight size three times. The first pass will cross the eclipse path hours before the. Moon's shadow gets there. The next one will pass just 15 minutes before the shadow's arrival.  But that last one, around 4:33 p.m. local crossing over the path in Maine and New Brunswick Canada, looks to be about a minute ahead of the shadow's arrival.

This estimates are based on the orbital parameters of the ISS last published by NORAD on Saturday afternoon, March 30 and they can and will probably change at least a little bit. NORAD updates information about the ISS's orbit, and the orbit 28,615 other objects, multiple times a day for satellite operators, as well as NASA and other space agencies, to keep track of everything.

Those orbits change over time as orbits slowly decay under Earth's gravity. Solar activity can slow down satellites and other spacecraft as it increases the density of the outer atmosphere, adding drag. Just as we can't forecast what the weather will be like in any detail along the path more than a week from now, we can't predict what space weather might bring either.  So there's a chance astronauts might be able to crowd around the zenith windows for a brief glimpse of the Sun's corona.

If the orbit does change enough to bring the station through the Moon' shadow, the astronauts wont enjoy the 4+ minutes of totality you might experience from the center of the eclipse path. They'll see only a few seconds of totality as the ISS moves southeast at 17,500 mph through the 106 mile wide shadow moving northeast at more than 3,000 mph.