Space Travel – Amazing Facts 4 u

Mars

Amazing Facts 4 U — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:30:48 +0000

50 Amazing and Interesting Facts about Mars | Amazing Facts 4U

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. Named after the Roman god of war, and often described as the “Red Planet” due to its reddish appearance. The month of March is named after Mars.
Mars’ red color is due to iron oxide, also known as rust, and has the consistency of talcum powder. Many ancient people believed the reddish color came from actual blood on the planet.
The ancient Greeks thought that Earth was the center of the universe and that Mars was one of the five traveling stars that revolved around it.
Egyptians called Mars the “the backward traveler” because Mars appeared to move backward through the zodiac every 25.7 months.
Mars has a diameter of about 6800 Km.
The atmosphere on Mars mostly made up of 95% carbon dioxide , 3% nitrogen, 1.6% argon and trace amounts of water and oxygen , is so thin that water cannot exist in liquid form , it can exist only as water vapor or ice.
No human could survive the low pressure of Mars. The oxygen in your blood would literally turn into bubbles, causing immediate death.
The Sun looks about half its size half it does from Earth when seen from Mars.
If you were driving 60 mph in a car, it would take nearly 272 years to get to Mars from Earth.
The surface of Mars is bombarded with a lethal dose of radiation every time the sun rises due to lack of protective ozone layer..
Mars has the largest and most violent dust storms in our entire solar system. These storms often have winds topping 125 mph, can last for weeks, and can cover the entire planet usually occurring when Mars is closest to the sun.
Considering Mars hostile environment , only 1/3 of spacecrafts sent to Mars have been successful.
Mars has enormous canyon named Mariner Valley which is an amazing 2,500 miles long and 4 miles deep. This gigantic canyon was possibly formed by the tectonic “cracking” of Mars’ crust and is the longest known crevice in the solar system.
Mars was formed about 4.5 billion years ago and is about 4,000 miles wide half the diameter of Earth. However it is much lighter than Earth, with only 1/10 of its mass. It’s the last rocky planet as the outer planets are all gaseous.
Mars’ crust is thicker than Earth’s and is made up of one piece, unlike Earth’s crust which consists of several moving plates.
Mars is the only planet other than earth to have polar caps.
Although it is much colder on Mars than on Earth, the similar tilt of Earth’s and Mars’ axes result in similar seasons.
Like Earth’s, Mars’ north and south polar caps shrink in the summer and grow in the winter. Also a day on Mars is 24 hours 37 minutes nearly the same as Earth’s.
It is believed that the polar caps are mostly frozen water with a thin layer of carbon dioxide. If melted into liquid form, the amount of water in the southern polar cap would cover the entire planet to a depth of about 36 feet.
Mars’ seasons are twice as long as those on Earth because it takes Mars 687 days to orbit the sun, twice as long as Earth.
The Earth’s moon is 240,000 miles away. Earth’s next closest neighbor is Venus, which comes as near as 24 million miles. After the moon and Venus, Mars is our next closest neighbor at 34 million miles away.
Amazingly when Mars and Earth are at the opposite sides of their orbits around the sun, they are separated by 249 million miles.
The orbit of Mars is the most eccentric of the eight planets.
Mars is home to Hellas, a vast and featureless plain that covers 1300 miles which was created by asteroids crashing into the planet’s surface of Mars nearly four billion years ago.
Mars’ moon Phobos (“fear”) rises in the west and sets in the east—twice a day. Deimos (“panic”), on the other hand, takes 2.7 days to rise in the east and set in the west.
The moons are named after the twin gods who accompanied Ares (or Mars) into battle.
Mars’ moon Phobos (fear) rises in the west and sets in the east twice a day. Deimos (panic) on the other hand, takes 2.7 days to rise in the east and set in the west. Mars’ moons are so named because the twin gods of panic and fear.
Phobos orbits very close to Mars and is gradually sinking into the Red Planet. In about 50 million years it might crash into Mars.
Amazingly Mars’ smallest moon, Deimos, has an escape velocity of just 5.2 meters/Sec meaning that if you were take a running jump while on it, you will launch off like a slow rocket.
Mars has no magnetic field, indicating that it does not have a molten metal core, like Earth.
Mars has 37.5% of the gravity that Earth has and we could jump three times as high on Mars.
Mars is home to the highest peak in the solar system called Olympus Mons which is about 15 miles high and has a diameter of 375 miles.It is called a shield volcano because it has such a wide base and rises very gradually.
The average temperature on Mars is −55 °C and can range from −153 °C in the winter to 20 °C in the summer.
In 1965, the United States spacecraft Mariner 4 made the first successful flyby of Mars. It took 228 days to reach Mars and sent only 22 images to Earth.
On November 14, 1971, the United States’ Mariner 9 was the first spacecraft to orbit Mars (or any other planet). After a massive dust storm cleared, Mariner 9 began transmitting nearly 73,000 images and revealing enormous volcanoes, huge canyons, frozen underground water in the form of permafrost, and what appeared to be dried-up river beds.
Mars 2, built by the former Soviet Union, has the distinction of being the first human-built object to touch down on Mars in November 1971. Unfortunately, it crashed into the surface during a massive dust storm.
July 20, 1976, was historic because the United States’ Viking 1 was the first human spacecraft to land intact and operational on the surface of Mars. Viking 2 followed, landing successfully on September 3, 1976. The Viking Landers relayed the first color pictures of the planet.
Amazing fact is that in 1999, NASA lost a $125million Mars orbiter because half the project staff used imperial measurements and the other half used metric.
In 1996, the United States launched Pathfinder so that it would land on America’s Independence Day July 4, 1997. It bounced for 92 seconds on airbags before stopping.
Pathfinder’s small robot, Sojourner, collected and studied Martian rocks. As a precaution it moved less than .5 inches per second. Sojourner was the first robot to explore another planet.
Only 12 Martian meteors are known to exist on earth and are collectively called SNC (“snick”) meteorites. Meteorites that fell to Earth in Morocco during a meteor shower in July of 2011 have been confirmed to be from Mars.
Amazingly there is a giant smiley face shaped crater on Mars.
The Mars Opportunity rover, whose mission was planned to go for just 3 months is still traveling across the Mars having surpassed its duration of activity by more than 10 years.
Aluminum recovered from the destroyed World Trade Center towers was used on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity.
NASA uses songs from The Beatles, Frank Sinatra, and The Doors to wake up the Mars Curiosity rover every morning. Mars Curiosity has only traveled roughly 400-500 meters since it landed.
India’s The Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft, also known as Mangalyaan, arrived at the Red Planet on the night of Sept. 23, 2014 just two days after NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution probe (MAVEN) reached Mars orbit.
India is the first Asian nation to reach Mars orbit, and the first nation in the world to do so in its first attempt. Amazingly the satellite’s development and execution was fast tracked and completed in a record 15 months.
The total cost of the Mangalyaan mission was just US$73 million , just about 10% of the budget allocated for similar mission by NASA.
So far only four entities have been able to put spacecraft in Mar’s orbit. They are United States, Soviet Union and Europe and India.
At present, Mars is host to seven functioning spacecrafts: five in orbit — the Mars Odyssey, Mars Express, Mangalyaan , Maven and Mars Orbiter, and two on the surface , Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity and the Mars Curiosity.

Home of the most beautiful quotes online: www.delightfulquotes.com

~ By Amazing Facts 4U Team

Saturn

Amazing Facts 4 U — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:30:28 +0000

40 Amazing and Interesting Facts about Saturn | Amazing Facts 4U

Saturn is a Roman name. In Greek mythology, we find Cronus, who is considered to be the lord of Titans. Saturn is just the Roman name for Cronus.
The day ‘Saturday’ in a week derives its name from this planet.
The Assyrians, who lived in modern-day Iraq, were the first to record sighting Saturn in 700 B.C.
Saturn is the second-largest planet in our Solar System after Jupiter which is 20% larger. It is the most beautiful planet in the solar system because of its stunning rings. In fact, Saturn’s nickname is “the jewel of the solar system.”
Saturn is the 6th planet from Sun and is one of the gas giants in our solar system others being Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune.
Saturn is big enough to hold 760 Earths but it has a mass that’s roughly equivalent to 95 times the mass of Earth. However, if you compare it with Sun, nearly 1,600 Saturns could fit inside it.
Considering its density, Saturn can easily float on the water since it’s density is 0.687. In contrast, the Earth and Mercury would sink the fastest.
The atmosphere of Saturn is mostly made of molecular hydrogen which accounts for 96.3% of the total atmosphere while helium takes up 3.25%. Rest is ammonia hydrosulfide aerosols, ammonia ice aerosols, ice aerosols, ethane, ammonia, methane etc.
The atmospheric pressure on Saturn is over 100 times greater than the Earth’s atmospheric pressure. The pressure is so powerful that it squeezes gas into liquid. It would crush any human-made spacecraft.
The magnetic field of Saturn is nearly 578 times as powerful as that of our Earth.
Scientists believe that the innermost core of the planet is made of rocky material and iron. Surrounding this core is an outer core made of methane, ammonia and water. The third layer is the liquid metallic hydrogen in highly compressed form. This third layer is covered by a fourth layer of viscous helium and hydrogen. This fourth and final layer gradually becomes gaseous at it moves towards the surface of the planet and eventually merges with the atmosphere of the planet.
Scientists say that the core of Saturn is nearly 10 to 20 times bigger than that of Earth.
The polar and equatorial diameters of Saturn are about 108,000 km and 120,000 km respectively. The planet has an equatorial circumference of 366,000 km.
The fifth-century B.C. text Surya Siddhanta from India approximated Saturn’s diameter just 1% off from the current estimate.
Saturn has temperature of about -350° F (-212° C). In contrast the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth is -129° F (-89° C).
Saturn gives off more than twice as much heat as it receives from the Sun. It is believed that Saturn generates heat when helium sinks slowly through liquid hydrogen deep inside the planet. In fact, the temperature at Saturn’s core is estimated to be about 11,700° C, which is almost as hot as the surface of the Sun.
From the Sun, Saturn is located at a distance of about 9.5 times the distance of Earth from Sun.
Saturn shows extraordinary golden and yellow bands in its atmosphere caused by the combination of heat emanating from the planet’s interior and superfast winds blowing in its upper atmosphere. Around the equator, this wind can reach a speed of 1,800 kph. The strongest tornadoes on Earth have reached speeds of only about 480 kph. Storms on Saturn can last for months or even years.
The planet spins very rapidly around its axis, completely one rotation in 10 hours and 30 minutes, making the planet slightly slower than Jupiter but faster than all other planets.
The planet completes one revolution around Sun in 29.4 Earth years i.e. about 10759 days.
Because Saturn spins on a tilt, it has seasons. Summer on Saturn lasts about 8 Earth years.
Saturn is often the third brightest planet in the night sky and has a yellowish color that does not twinkle. Saturn is the most distant planet visible to naked eyes from Earth.
Sun would appear 10 times smaller viewed from Saturn than it does from Earth. On average, Earth receives 90 times more sunlight than Saturn.
Traveling to Saturn by car at 70 miles per hour would take about 1300 years when Saturn is closest to Earth and 1600 years when Saturn is at its farthest.
Galileo Galilei was the first ever person to look at Saturn using a telescope in 1610. His telescope was not powerful enough but he did notice ring-like structures around the planet that eventually turned out to be real rings.
Saturn has the most amazing planetary ring system in entire Solar System. The largest known ring of the planet is nearly 200 times the diameter of Saturn. Rings are made of water ice and small amounts of rocks and carbonaceous dust. The ring system spreads out over a distance of 175,000 miles (282,000 km.).
The objects that make up the rings vary in size. With smallest particles being the size of a sugar grain and the largest ones being as large as a house. The rings fan out to a distance of 120,700 kilometers from the planet’s atmosphere but the main rings are amazingly only 30 feet thick.
Scientists speculate that Saturn’s rings may disappear in 50 million years. Saturn’s gravititional pull will either suck the rings into the planet, or the rings will dissolve into space.
Saturn’s rings seem to disappear about every 14 years when Saturn is tilted directly in line with Earth.
Cassini-Huygens spacecraft revealed that some of the rings have weird formations. They have particles piling up in ridges and bumps that extend up to 2 miles high in space.
All the other gas giants i.e. Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune have rings, although they are much fainter and less spectacular than Saturn’s.
Only Jupiter has more moons (63) than Saturn (61) in entire solar system, not counting Saturn’s hundreds of “moonlets.”
The most notable moons of Saturn include Enceladus, Rhea and Titan. Titan is the largest moon of the Saturn and is the second largest moon in entire Solar System. The credit for largest moon of Solar System goes to Ganymede of Jupiter.
Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is the only known moon to have a substantial atmosphere, which is 370 miles deep, 10 times thicker than Earth’s atmosphere. Conditions on Titan may resemble ancient Earth conditions, though at a much lower temperature. Titan’s atmosphere is rich of nitrogen. The moon is primarily composed of rock and water ice. Scientists believe that underneath the frozen surface of Titan lie lakes of liquid methane.
Titan is the second-largest moon in the solar system. Only Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is larger. Titan is even bigger than Mercury.
Saturn’s moon Enceladus which was discovered in 1789 by William Herschel has geysers that erupt icy particles, water vapor, and organic compounds. It is the shiniest object in the solar system because its icy surface reflects most of the light.
The geysers on Enceladus not only feed the rings around Saturn but also may contain “ingredients for life.” Only two other outer solar system objects have known active eruptions: Neptune’s moon Triton and Jupiter’s moon Io, which are believed to erupt nitrogen and sulfur, respectively.
Lapetus, another moon of Saturn has one side dark as coal and the other side bright as snow.
On July 1, 2004, the Cassini-Huygens was the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn. Launched in 1997, it traveled over 2 billion miles at a speed of about 70000 miles per hour before it reached Saturn.
The first spacecraft to fly by Saturn was Pioneer 11, which blasted off in 1973 and arrived at Saturn in 1979. Voyagers 1 and 2 also completed fly-bys in 1980 and 1981. Voyager 1 is now the farthest human-made object in space.

A lovely insight. Find more at www.enlighteningquotes.com

~ By Amazing Facts 4U Team

Space Travel

Amazing Facts 4 U — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 09:30:15 +0000

50 Amazing Facts that will surprise you About Space Travel | Amazing Facts 4U

The first rocket was called the V-2 Rocket and was made by a German scientist and Engineer Wernher Von Braun during World War II and was used as a weapon against the allies.
The fact is a spacecraft needs to accelerate to just over 17,000 miles per hour to escape the Earth’s gravity (approximately 5 miles per second). This is called escape velocity.
An amazing fact is at blast-off around 300,000 gallons of water is released beneath the shuttle’s engines as a noise suppressant.
Fact is space shuttle main engine weighs 1/7 the as much as a train engine but delivers as much power as 39 locomotives.
The external tank on space shuttles is not painted. It is the only part of the shuttle that is lost after launch, so it is not necessary to worry about metal corrosion.
The average journey into orbit takes about 8.5 minutes.
Yuri Gagarin was first man to travel in space, on 12 April, 1961, orbiting the Earth once.
The first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn, flew into space on 20 February, 1962.
On 20 July, 1969, Apollo 11 made the first Moon landing. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. Michael Collins manned the command module.
The amazing fact is just twenty seconds’ worth of fuel remained when Apollo 11s lunar module landed on the moon.
The last Apollo space mission, Apollo 17, took place in December 1972. Eugene Cernan and Harrison H. Schmitt landed on the Moon’s surface in a lunar module. In all, six Apollo spacecraft made successful landings on the Moon. Amazingly no one has left Earth’s orbit since then.
An astronaut can be up to 2 to 3 Inches taller returning from space due to expansion of cartilage disks in the spine in absence of gravity.
Fact is if you went out into space, you would explode before you suffocated because there’s no air pressure.
Galileo spacecraft traveled 2.4 billion miles on it’s way to Jupiter using 67 gallons of fuel on the way to control the flight. Amazingly this is equivalent to 36 million miles travel per gallon.
A full moon is nine times brighter than a half-moon.
It would take more than 150 years to drive a car to the sun.
When Galileo’s probe entered the Jupiter atmosphere, it was traveling at amazing 106000 miles per hour which is the fastest speed by man made object.
In space, astronauts cannot cry properly, because there is no gravity, so the tears can’t flow down their faces!
Astronauts cannot belch since there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.
In zero-G, astronauts can lose muscle mass at a rate of 5% a week. Most people know at least the basis of that fact, but bones can also atrophy at a rate of 1% a week. Blood pressure evens out throughout the body as well. The body of an astronaut gets so used to this that when they return to earth they often need to be taken on stretchers.
For a satellite or spaceship to stay in orbit 200 Km above earth , It must amazingly fly at over 8 Km per Second.
Water acts as jelly out there in space.
The amazing fact is that the metric system was the culprit for the loss of the Mars Climate orbiter.
Amazingly NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has reached the edge of our solar system after 33 years and after traveling for 10.8 billion miles . The craft was first launched on September 5th, 1977 .
The second satellite ever launched by the United States is still orbiting the earth. Vanguard 1 was launched on March 17th, 1958, achieving the highest altitude of any man-made vehicle up to that point, and was also the first satellite to be powered by solar energy.It is predicted to remain in orbit well into the 22nd century.
The Mars Opportunity rover was expected to last for 91 days. Amazingly it’s still going after 9 years! It was launched from Earth on July 7, 2003. It landed on Mars on January 25, 2004.
Astronauts abroad at the international space station amazingly see 15 Sunsets and 15 sunrises per day averaging one every 45 minutes.
The International Space Station is the most expensive object ever built, at US$150 billion. Roughly half of the total price was contributed by the USA, the rest by other nations including Europe, Japan and Russia.
The International Space Station or ISS was completed in 2011, but people have been living on it since November 2nd, 2000.
The ISS is primarily composed of 15 pressurised modules (seven US, five Russian, two Japanese and one European) and four large solar panels. It weighs amazing 420,000 kilograms (925,000 pounds), which is more than 320 automobiles.
The total length of the ISS from end to end is amazing 109 metres (357 feet), longer than both a “proper” football field and an American Football field.
The International Space Station has a liveable space equivalent to a five-bedroom house and travels at 17,500 mph.
The Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center is so large that rain clouds form inside it.
The Apollo 12 mission crashed a 2.5-ton piece of metal into the moon causing the moon to amazingly “ring like a bell” for nearly an hour!
Sunita Williams, the astronaut holds the record for most days in space for a female (195). On April 16, 2007, she completed the first marathon ran by someone in orbit. Her sister ran the marathon on earth while Sunita ran the marathon in space. They were updated on each other’s progress throughout the race. Sunita finished the Boston Marathon in 4 hours and 24 minutes. In 2008 Sunita Williams once again ran the Boston Marathon but this time on earth.
An amazingly unprotected human beings can survive in space for just 2 minutes.
If two pieces of metal touch in space, they amazingly become permanently stuck together. This doesn’t happen on earth because the atmosphere puts a layer of oxidized material between the surfaces.
The Saturn V rocket which carried man to the Moon develops power equivalent to fifty 747 jumbo jets.
Astronauts in orbit feel weightless because they are constantly falling, not because there is no gravity in space.
The full cost of a spacesuit is about $11 million although 70% of this is for the backpack and the control module.
A space suit can weigh between 50 and 350 pounds on Earth.
Launch and entry space suits are orange as an aid to search and rescue operations in case of emergency. Suits for spacewalks are white to reflect the sun’s heat.
Fact is oxygen is circulated around the helmet in space suits in order to prevent the visor from misting.
The middle layers of space suits are blown up like a balloon to press against the astronaut’s body. Amazingly without this pressure, the astronaut’s body would boil!
The gloves included in the spacesuit have silicon rubber fingertips which allow the astronaut some sense of touch.
In 1962, the U.S. blew up a hydrogen bomb in space that was amazing 100 times more powerful than Hiroshima.
In movies, a human body explodes if it is pushed into space without a suit. But it’s mostly fiction. Although liquids do boil in a vacuum, your blood is kept under pressure by your circulatory system and would be just fine. It is a lack of air that will kill you.
The amazing fact is about half of any space walk on the International space station is spent in total darkness.
We are all traveling through space. Latest estimates put the speed of the Earth in relation to the cosmic background radiation at 390 km/sec, or 872,405 miles per hour.
Robotic spacecraft have so far landed on the moon, Venus, Mars, and several asteroids.

If you desire further simple wisdom to help center your thoughts, go and subscribe to our blog: www.wisdomhealingcenter.com

~ By Amazing Facts 4U Team

NASA

Amazing Facts 4 U — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 04:30:04 +0000

60 Amazing Fascinating NASA Facts | Amazing Facts 4U

The acronym “NASA” stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA was established in 1958 by President Eisenhower one year after the Soviets launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite. It has been a pioneer and leader in the field of space missions in the world.
Around 19,000 employees work at NASA headquarters in Washington and in its 10 command centers around the United States. Additional 40,000 contractors work for the space agency.
The most well-known bases are the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida where space shuttles are prepared and launched, and the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas where shuttle mission control and International Space Station operators are located.
The area code for Kennedy Space Center in Florida and its surrounding areas is 321, given for its pronunciation resembling the countdown before liftoff.
NASA designs its robotic missions to comets, Mars, and other planets in the solar system at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Around 85% of NASA’s annual budget goes to researchers and engineers that are responsible for developing the technology used on manned and unmanned missions into space.
A poll revealed that Americans thought NASA’s funding accounted for 20% of the federal budget. In fact, NASA has received one cent or less per every tax dollar since 1975.
So far NASA has so far obtained about 6,500 patents. NASA has invented invisible braces and scratch-resistant lenses.
SR-71, also known as the “Blackbird,” is the research aircraft used by NASA as a testbed for high-speed, high-altitude aeronautical research. It was secretly designed in the 1950s.
In May 1961 Freedom 7, the first piloted Mercury spacecraft carrying Astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr., was launched from Cape Canaveral. It was the first American space flight involving human beings.
President John F. Kennedy gave NASA the goal of sending a man to the moon by the end of the 1960s.
Amazingly way back in 1965, NASA built a wind tunnel capable of reaching wind speeds of up to Mach 50.
July 16-24, 1969 – Apollo 11 went to the moon. On July 20, 1969, the Lunar Module with astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin landed on the lunar surface while Michael Collins orbited overhead in the Apollo command module. Armstrong was first to set foot on the surface, saying that it is “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
When Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface, he had to make sure not to lock the Eagle’s door because there was no outer handle.
The amazing fact is Neil Armstrong’s NASA application was late by a week. If it weren’t for his friend, Dick Day’s effort to secretly slip his application into the pile, he would have been rejected.
Amazingly the Apollo – 11 computers had less processing power than a simple cell phone and 1/6 th computing power of today’s calculators.
When Apollo 11’s lunar lander, the Eagle, separated from the orbiter, the cabin wasn’t fully depressurized, resulting in a burst of gas equivalent to popping a champagne cork. It threw the module’s landing nearly four miles off target.
Pilot Neil Armstrong had nearly run out of fuel landing the Eagle, and many at mission control worried he might crash.
NASA took measures to prevent microorganisms from returning to earth on or in the Apollo capsules because they weren’t sure that there was no life on the moon.
Twelve men have so far walked on the moon, all during the Apollo missions. Amazingly 11 of the 12 men who have walked on the moon were Boy Scouts.
The most amazing and embarrassing part of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon was the United States government’s failure to ensure the lives of its astronauts as no life insurance company in the world was ready to insure for this apparent suicide mission. The astronauts in fact signed a series of autographs which could be sold if they indeed perished on their miracle mission.
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin returned victorious from their moon landing, there was widespread fear that they could have brought lunar germs. They were quarantined in a converted Airstream trailer for 21 days.
In 1970, the Apollo 13 lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank exploded.
John Aaron, a NASA flight controller, not only saved Apollo 12 after it was struck by lightning but also saved the Apollo 13 crew members by developing a unique power-up sequence to allow a safe reentry.
Landsat was a series of satellites that were first launched in 1972 for the purpose of photographing the whole surface of the Earth from space.
The twin spacecraft Voyager 1 and 2 were launched in 1977, 16 days apart. Voyager 1 is about 19 billion kilometers from Earth while Its sibling, Voyager 2, is 15.5 billion kilometers from our planet. Voyager 1 has already entered interstellar space becoming the first man-made object to leave the Solar system. It is traveling at an amazing 60000 km per hour and should fly near the nearest star in about 40,000 years. Voyager 2 should also leave the solar system in 2015.
The most amazing fact is that Voyager 1 has only 68 KB of memory on board. Natural radioactive decay provides heat that generates enough electricity to help Voyager 1 still communicate with Earth. It takes NASA and Voyager I approximately 32 hours to communicate with each other.
When Skylab reentered the atmosphere and crashed in Australia in 1979, the Australian government fined NASA $400 for littering. The fine remained unpaid for 30 years.
During the flight of the Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-31) in April 1990, the crew deployed the Hubble Space Telescope in space.
The Mars Pathfinder landed on Mars in July 1997. Two days later, the Sojourner Rover rolled out of the Pathfinder and onto Mars’s surface and began transmitting pictures of Mars back to Earth.
In 1998, NASA grew Insulin crystals in space. Researchers found that it was so effective it could reduce Insulin intake from 1-3 times per day to once every 3 days.
The amazing fact is that in 1999, NASA lost a $ 125 million Mars orbiter because half of the project staff used imperial measurements, and the other half used metric.
A man named Gregory W. Nemitz claimed ownership of Asteroid 433 Eros, on which the spacecraft Shoemaker landed in 2001. His company Orbital Development issued NASA a parking ticket for $20.
The space shuttle program has had more than 120 successful flights but also two disasters in which the shuttles and crews were lost (Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003).
U.S. and Russian astronauts aboard International Space Station have their own separate water supplies. While the U.S. water supply uses iodine for bacteria control, the Russian water supply uses silver. If these substances were to mix, a silver-iodine precipitate would form in the water, which may clog the sublimator in the NASA EMU spacesuit.
In 2006, NASA launched a probe to Pluto, just months before it was demoted to dwarf planet status. It was the fastest spacecraft ever launched by NASA.
In 2006, NASA finally admitted that they no longer had the original videotapes of the moon landing because they recorded over them.
In 2006, NASA found a strange cosmic noise that boomed six times louder than expected, known as the space roar. The cause is still not known.
In June 2012, the National Reconnaissance Office donated 2 telescopes to NASA that are more powerful than the Hubble just because they were ‘obsolete’. Both of these satellites were never launched.
Curiosity entered Mars’ atmosphere at 13,200 mph,17 times the speed of sound when it prepared to land on it.
Curiosity weighed one ton. When it landed in Aug 2012, it sent debris flying more than 1,300 yards from the touchdown site on Mars.
More than 1.2 million people submitted their names to be sent to Mars, etched on a microchip that the Curiosity rover will carry on its “back.”
Curiosity has a laser gun that can vaporize a rock from 23 feet away to examine its chemical composition.
Due to the unreliability of solar power, Curiosity was energized by an advanced nuclear power system called the Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermo Electric Generator. The on-board nuclear power plant was capable of generating electricity from plutonium-238 dioxide for up to 14 years, which should be plenty of time since Curiosity was to be functional only for 23 months.
Despite the fact that Curiosity spent two years on Mars, the rover only traveled a total distance of about 10 miles from its landing site during the entire duration of its mission after making the 350 million-mile trip to Mars.
Three men from Yemen sued NASA for trespassing on Mars. They claimed that they inherited the planet from their ancestors 3,000 years ago.
NASA often shows the Hollywood movie “Armageddon” as part of its management training program asking new staff to identify the scientific inaccuracies. There are at least 168 of them.
NASA will text you whenever the International Space Station passes overhead.
NASA will pay you $15,000 to lay in bed 24 hours a day for 90 days to measure the effects of zero gravity on your body.
NASA has discovered a “Waterworld” planet about 40 light-years away from earth that might contain exotic materials such as “hot ice” and “superfluid water.”
While filming his Victorian masterpiece, Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick used lenses that were commissioned by NASA for the Apollo moon landings. These lenses allowed him to capture scenes lit only by candlelight.
There is a large area over Brazil where the Earth’s magnetic field has weakened called South Atlantic Anomaly. NASA in fact powers down its satellites when passing over it.
NASA is developing a new engine that can shorten a Mars mission to days.
Quinoa is so nutritionally dense and complete that it is being considered a possible crop in NASA’s Controlled Ecological Life Support System for long-duration manned space expeditions.
NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building is so huge it needs about 10,000 tons of Air Conditioning equipment to prevent rain clouds from forming inside on humid days.
NASA is building a bi-directional “Flying Wing” aircraft. It can fly forwards or sideways at full speed.
NASA made the most perfect sphere ever created to test Einstein’s theory of relativity with no more than a difference of 40 atoms on its surface.
NASA solved a $100 million vibration problem for 5 bucks by programming their screens to flicker.
In order for NASA to recognize you as an astronaut, you must travel higher than 50 miles from the Earth’s surface.
Amazing fact is that the Soviet probe Lunokhod 1 was lost for 38 years on the Moon until NASA found it and succeeded in using its reflector dish.

Visit Wisdom Healing Center site at www.wisdomhealingcenter.com

~ By Amazing Facts 4U Team

International Space Station (ISS)

Amazing Facts 4 U — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 09:30:34 +0000

40 Amazing Facts About International Space Station | Amazing Facts 4U

The International Space Station (ISS) is a space station in low Earth orbit. It is a modular structure whose first component was launched in 1998. It is now the largest artificial body in orbit often seen with the naked eye from Earth.
Russia launched Zarya atop a Proton-K rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Two weeks later, NASA launched Unity. Those were the two first modules of the International Space Station.
The amazing fact is that it took 136 space flights on seven different types of launch vehicles to build it.
It weighs an amazing 1 million pounds including visiting spacecraft.
It has a complete surface area the size of a US football field.
It has more livable space than a 6-bedroom house.
It has two bathrooms, a gymnasium, and a 360-degree bay window.
It has 8 miles of wire just to connect the electrical power system.
All its research experiments and spacecraft systems are housed in a bit more than one hundred telephone-booth-sized racks.
The station is divided into two sections, the Russian Orbital Segment (ROS) and the United States Orbital Segment (USOS). It has been built at the cost of 150 billion USD most of the components by Boeing.
The International Space Station (ISS) is the most expensive single object ever built by mankind. Roughly half of the total price was contributed by the USA. The other 15 contributor nations are Canada, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
The International Space Station (ISS) Solar Array Length is about 240 feet (73 meters).
There have been 180 spacewalks conducted in support of space station assembly, totaling almost 1,130 hours.
The International Space Station (ISS) maintains an orbit with an altitude of between 330 km (205 miles) and 435 km (270 miles) by means of reboost maneuvers.
The average speed of ISS is about 27,750 km/hour i.e. About 7.7 km/Second. 52 computers control the systems on the ISS.
Main U.S. control computers have 1.5 gigabytes of total main hard drive storage in the U.S. segment compared to modern PCs which commonly have 500 gigabyte hard drives.
The International Space Station (ISS) has been continuously occupied by astronauts since 2 November 2000.
there have been 151 launches to the space station: 98 Russian vehicles, 37 space shuttles, seven U.S. commercial vehicles, five European vehicles, and four Japanese vehicles.
The International Space Station (ISS) serves as a microgravity and space environment research laboratory for the crew to conduct experiments in biology, human biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology, and other fields suited for the testing of spacecraft systems and equipment required for missions to the Moon and Mars.
It has been visited by 214 astronauts and cosmonauts from 15 different nations.
International Space Station (ISS) has more than 100,000 people working for space agencies and more than 500 contractor facilities in 37 US states and 16 countries. 68 countries have been involved in the research onboard the station.
After the U.S. Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, Soyuz rockets became the only provider of transport for astronauts at the International Space Station.
The amazing Fact is that astronauts aboard the ISS see 15 sunrises and 15 sunsets a day, averaging about one every 45 minutes.
Amazingly there is a gun kept in ISS belonging to Russians to protect themselves against bears in case their capsule lands off-course on reentry into the earth.
The amazing fact is that Pizza Hut once made a delivery to ISS in 2001 paying the Russians $1 million to transport the Pizza and advertise it commercially.
The fact is that NASA has a service texting you whenever ISS passes overhead if you register your mobile number.
There are “oxygen candles” that are used aboard the ISS. When ignited can provide enough oxygen for one person for 24 hours.
The amazing Fact is that there was a science fiction movie filmed in space aboard the ISS in 2008 called “Apogee of Fear”. It has never been released publicly.
There exists a small memory device inside the International Space Station that contains the digitized DNA of Stephen Hawking, Stephen Colbert, and Playboy model Jo Garcia. It is called the Immortality’
Astronauts have a patch of Velcro inside their helmets so that they can scratch their noses when needed.
Amazingly American astronauts on the ISS can vote in elections from orbit by secure email.
In 2007, astronaut Sunita Williams ran an entire marathon onboard the International Space Station, simultaneously with the Boston Marathon, that her sister and a fellow astronaut were running in
In 2009, Stephen Colbert won a NASA competition to have a module of the ISS named after him, but NASA opted to name it ‘Tranquility’ instead. They did, however, name a treadmill on the ISS after him. It is called the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (C.O.L.B.E.R.T.)
Astronauts in the ISS “do their laundry” by having new clothes shipped to them in an unmanned spacecraft that then has the old clothes put into it and is burnt up upon reentry.
The amazing Fact is that some of the shooting stars we see are actually astronaut poop burning up in the atmosphere.
The spacewalks can cause astronauts’ fingernails to fall off due to the current glove design.
U.S. and Russian astronauts on the ISS have a separate system of water supply. While the U.S. water uses iodine for bacteria control, the Russian water uses silver. If these substances mix, silver-iodine precipitate forms in the water, which may clog the sublimator in the NASA EMU spacesuit.
Astronauts must have good airflow around them when they sleep, otherwise, they could wake up oxygen-deprived and gasping for air because a bubble of their own exhaled carbon dioxide would have formed around their heads.
Astronauts can’t cry in space. Amazingly because of the weightless environment, the tears just collect in little balls and sting your eyes.
An interesting fact is that without gravity to pull fluids down, astronauts’ sinuses get clogged up and they can’t really taste much of anything.

Home of the most beautiful quotes online: www.aspiringquotes.com

~ By Amazing Facts 4U Team

Neptune

Amazing Facts 4 U — Sat, 14 Oct 2023 09:30:04 +0000

20 Amazing and Interesting Facts about Neptune | Amazing Facts 4U

Neptune gets its name from Roman and Greek mythology. Neptune is actually the name of the Roman god of the sea.
Neptune is the first planet in our entire solar system whose existence was predicted by mathematical calculations before we actually spotted it using a telescope.
It was Alex Bouvard, a French astronomer who predicted that the gravitation pull of some other celestial body was responsible for giving Uranus its orbital irregularities. His suggestion was used as a basis of mathematical calculations by Johann Galle, a German astronomer to help scientists spot Neptune using a telescope.
Neptune was discovered on September 23, 1846. Neptune is the most distant planet since Pluto has been demoted to a dwarf planet.
Neptune is covered by clouds and emanates a blue tint. The blue tint could be due to methane which is known for absorbing red light.
Just beneath Neptune’s atmosphere is a thick layer of a fluid mixture consisting of methane ice, ammonia, and water. Due to this, it is often referred to as an ice giant.
The core of Neptune is made of magnesium silicate and iron.
Neptune has a mass 17 times greater than the mass of Earth but surface gravity is about 17% stronger than earth. The overall volume of Neptune is 58 times that of the earth.
The magnetic field of the planet is 27 times greater than that of Earth.
By volume 80% of Neptune’s atmosphere is made of hydrogen. Helium takes up 19% and the rest is methane. Neptune is the densest gaseous planet in the entire solar system.
If considered by mass, 60-70% of the planet is ice, 25% is rock, and the rest is taken up by hydrogen and helium.
The amazing fact about Neptune is that despite its great distance from Earth and despite getting enough sunlight to keep the planet warm and drive its atmosphere, the winds on the planet can reach a top speed of 2,400 kilometers an hour which is the fastest wind speed in the solar system.
The surface temperature of Neptune is about -220 degrees Celsius. It is the coldest planet in the solar system.
In 1989, Voyager 2 tracked a large dark storm on the southern hemisphere of Neptune called as ‘Great Dark Spot’ which was big enough to engulf the entire Earth.
Neptune has an oval-shaped elliptical orbit the average distance being 4.5 billion kilometers or 2.8 billion miles from the sun which is about 30 times the distance of Earth from the Sun. It can’t be seen with naked eyes.
The planet completes one revolution around the Sun in about 165 Earth years. Since its discovery in 1846, the planet completed one revolution in 2011.
Neptune has 5 rings but they are not easily visible. These rings are not at all uniform and consist of arcs that are thick and bright dust clumps. Scientists believe that these rings are relatively young and not very stable.
Neptune has 14 known moons. The largest of all moons of Neptune is Triton which was also discovered in 1846 the same year the planet itself was discovered.
Amazingly Triton is the only large moon that revolves around Neptune in the direction opposite to the direction of rotation of the planet known as retrograde orbit.
The only spacecraft to have ever visited Neptune is Voyager 2 of NASA which visited the planet in 1989 passing within 3,000 km of the planet’s north pole discovering 6 moons and the rings of the planet.

Visit and subscribe to our blog! Get enriching & uplifting quotes right in your inbox: www.informativequotes.com