do the astronauts in the space station age differently than us on earth
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A little, but the concept is greatly misunderstood. It’s not a way of time traveling. It’s a spacetime relationship, which is hard to understand for a lot of people as spacetime itself is a strange concept.
Simply put, even in the extremes where you can travel incredible distances, you’ll always be handicapped by the fact that you’re traveling extreme distances and will never encounter anyone outside of your general vicinity experiencing similar spacetime. So you’ll never notice anyone or anything being any different, because everyone around you will not be all that far away.
The effects are technically possible to experience at significant levels in the most science fiction extremes approaching light speed, but this is more or less impossible. It’s a thought experiment only.
Practical time dilation is really only experienced in atomic clocks and similar systems relying on unfathomable precision.
Others have discussed the time-dilation aspect, but there is also ongoing research into other physiological effects of spending extended periods of time in micro-gravity, some of which may have impacts on the aging process. The ability to spend long periods of time in space is pretty new and only a short list of people have actually done it, so the data is pretty limited. Far too early to say whether aging is affected, but that is something that they’re looking at, among many other things.
Yes…on extremely small scales. The ISS orbits Earth at a little over 7.6 kilometers per second…that’s very fast, way faster than a bullet, but not nearly enough to experience time dilation at an appreciable level. We have a formula for time dilation, and so we can determine that at that speed, if an astronaut spent a full year on the ISS (which they don’t), she would age 1/100th of a second slower than someone who sat still on Earth for one year.
In other words, there are 31,557,600 seconds in a year. An astronaut spending a year aboard the ISS would experience 31,557,599.99 seconds.
Yes. Time dilation is a minor concern though as it’s only .007 seconds per 6 months in orbit.
It’s actually more of an issue for GPS, which relies on satellites and ground units 5 in close sync, and even a few hundreths of a second could impact high accuracy navigation.
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