Posted on by Abby Cessna

List of Planets

Planets and other objects in our Solar System. Credit: NASA.

Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun but not the hottest. That distinction goes to Venus. The planet was named after the Roman messenger of the gods because it orbits the Sun so quickly. Mercury is a small, grayish planet that is often said to resemble the Earth’s Moon.

Venus, the second planet from the Sun, is the hottest planet because its atmosphere tends to trap heat. Named after the Roman goddess of beauty, Venus is the brightest planet. In fact, the only celestial body that is brighter is the Moon. Venus is around the same size as Earth with similar gravity, causing it to be referred to as Earth’s twin.

Earth is the third planet from the Sun. It is the only planet where life has been confirmed to exist. Roughly two-thirds of Earth’s surface is covered with oceans, and so far Earth is the only place where liquid water is known to exist.

Mars was named after the Roman god of war because of its red color, which is caused by rust in the rocks on the surface. Since it is the closest planet to Earth, people have long wondered if life could exist on Mars. Although no life has been discovered so far, some people still think that there may be life on Mars.  

Jupiter, a gas giant, is the largest planet in this solar system. It was named after the Roman king of the gods, probably because of its size. Jupiter has 63 moons, one of which, Ganymede, is the solar system’s largest moon. Jupiter is also home to an enormous storm, the Great Red Spot, which has been raging for over two hundred years.

Saturn, the sixth planet from the sun, was named after the Roman god of agriculture and harvest, Saturnus. It is also a gas giant and therefore does not have a solid surface. One distinctive feature of the planet is its rings, which are composed of small pieces of rock and ice.

Uranus, the third largest planet, is also a gas giant. One interesting fact is that its moons were named after characters from works of literature by Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. Uranus orbits very slowly; it takes the planet 84 years to circle the sun.

Neptune is the furthest planet from the Sun. It was named after the Roman god of the sea; this is not surprising because it is bright blue, reminding one of a beautiful ocean. Neptune has four rings, although they are difficult to see. When Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, Neptune became the eighth and last planet in the solar system.

Universe Today has a number of other articles about this including the planets and the solar system for kids.

If you are looking for more information check out this overview of the planets and article on planets in our solar system.

Astronomy Cast also has numerous articles on the planets so take a look at this one for starters: the planet Earth.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Lightning Detected on Mars

An illustration of a dust storm on Mars. Credit: Brian Grimm and Nilton Renno

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The first direct evidence of lightning has been detected on Mars. Researchers from the University of Michigan found signs of electrical discharges during dust storms on the red planet using an innovative microwave detector . The bolts were dry lightning, said Professor Chris Ruf. “What we saw on Mars was a series of huge and sudden electrical discharges caused by a large dust storm. Clearly, there was no rain associated with the electrical discharges on Mars. However, the implied possibilities are exciting.”

The Space Physics Research Laboratory at the University of Michigan developed the kurtosis detector, which is capable of differentiating between thermal and non-thermal radiation. The device took measurements of microwave emissions from Mars for approximately five hours a day for 12 days between May 22 and June 16, 2006.

On June 8, 2006 both an unusual pattern of non-thermal radiation and an intense Martian dust storm occurred, the only time that non-thermal radiation was detected. Non-thermal radiation would suggest the presence of lightning.

Electric activity in Martian dust storms has important implications for Mars science, the researchers said.
“It affects atmospheric chemistry, habitability and preparations for human exploration. It might even have implications for the origin of life, as suggested by experiments in the 1950s,” said Professor Nilton Renno of the university’s Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences.

“Mars continues to amaze us,” said Michael Sanders, manager of exploration systems and technology at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a researcher involved in the study. “Every new look at the planet gives us new insights.”

The new findings are to appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Source: University of Michigan

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

More Atmospheric CO2 Today Than in the Past 2.1 Millions Years

Earth from space. Credit: NASA

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Researchers have been able to determine the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over the past 2.1 million years in the sharpest detail yet by analyzing the shells of single–celled plankton. Their findings shed new light on CO2’s role in the earth’s cycles of cooling and warming, confirming many researchers’ suspicions that higher carbon dioxide levels coincided with warmer intervals during the study period. But it also rules out a drop in CO2 as the cause for earth’s ice ages growing longer and more intense some 850,000 years ago.

The study, published in the June 19 issue of the journal Science shows that peak CO2 levels over the last 2.1 million years averaged only 280 parts per million; but today, CO2 is at 385 parts per million, or 38% higher. This finding means that researchers will need to look back further in time for an analog to modern day climate change.

Bärbel Hönisch diving for plankton in an early phase of the study. Credit: Steve Doo
Bärbel Hönisch diving for plankton in an early phase of the study. Credit: Steve Doo

In the study, Bärbel Hönisch, a geochemist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and her colleagues reconstructed CO2 levels by analyzing the shells of single-celled plankton buried under the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Africa. By dating the shells and measuring their ratio of boron isotopes, they were able to estimate how much CO2 was in the air when the plankton were alive. This method allowed them to see further back than the precision records preserved in cores of polar ice, which go back only 800,000 years.

Around 850,000 years ago, the climate cycles on Earth switched from being dominated by 40,000 year cycles, to the stronger 100,000 year cycles of the more recent times. The time period from 800 – 1,000 kyr ago is called the mid-Pleistocene transition, and since the rhythms of the Earth’s orbit didn’t change, some scientists have attributed that shift to falling CO2 levels. But the study found that CO2 was flat during this transition and unlikely to have triggered the change.

“Previous studies indicated that CO2 did not change much over the past 20 million years, but the resolution wasn’t high enough to be definitive,” said Hönisch. “This study tells us that CO2 was not the main trigger, though our data continues to suggest that greenhouse gases and global climate are intimately linked.”

The timing of the ice ages is believed to be controlled mainly by the earth’s orbit and tilt, which determines how much sunlight falls on each hemisphere. Two million years ago, the earth underwent an ice age every 41,000 years. But some time around 850,000 years ago, the cycle grew to 100,000 years, and ice sheets reached greater extents than they had in several million years—a change too great to be explained by orbital variation alone.

Barbel Honisch with a mass spectrometer used to measure boron isotopes to reconstruct past CO2. Credit: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Barbel Honisch with a mass spectrometer used to measure boron isotopes to reconstruct past CO2. Credit: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

A global drawdown in CO2 is just one theory proposed for the transition. A second theory suggests that advancing glaciers in North America stripped away soil in Canada, causing thicker, longer lasting ice to build up on the remaining bedrock. A third theory challenges how the cycles are counted, and questions whether a transition happened at all.

The low carbon dioxide levels outlined by the study through the last 2.1 million years make modern day levels, caused by industrialization, seem even more anomalous, says Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved in the research.

“We know from looking at much older climate records that large and rapid increase in C02 in the past, (about 55 million years ago) caused large extinction in bottom-dwelling ocean creatures, and dissolved a lot of shells as the ocean became acidic,” he said. “We’re heading in that direction now.”

The idea to approximate past carbon dioxide levels using boron, an element released by erupting volcanoes and used in household soap, was pioneered over the last decade by the paper’s coauthor Gary Hemming, a researcher at Lamont-Doherty and Queens College. The study’s other authors are Jerry McManus, also at Lamont; David Archer at the University of Chicago; and Mark Siddall, at the University of Bristol, UK.

Source: EurekAlert

Posted on by Mark Mortimer

Book Review: Missions to the Moon

Missions to the Moon

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The Apollo Moon missions stand as the ultimate in humankind’s ascension beyond Earth. Only a few, favoured individuals explored, frolicked and golfed on the Moon’s surface. But their favour came with the grace of the Apollo program, countless individuals and an extraordinary effort by one nation in a race with another. Rod Pyle in his portfolio book “Missions to the Moon” provides an entertaining resource for anyone wanting to relook at one of “Man’s Greatest Adventure”.

This portfolio book has few pages, only 63. But the wealth of material doesn’t reflect this. Each pair of pages serves as a self-contained chapter and the book’s 27 chapters quickly run through the whole event in chronological order.

Its arrangement comes with no surprises. Half the book is the lead up to the first landing by the crew of Apollo 11. Giving due coverage to the imagination of Jules Verne, the exigencies of war, the impetus of the space race and the preliminary test flights, the book sets the stage. With the use of judiciously chosen photographs, artifact images and copied publications, the book pulls the reader into the emotions and the times. For example, there’s a portrait of a young Jules Verne and an image of one of his books. As well, a copy of the FBI’s 1948 review details von Braun’s possible political background. And, a copy of a 1969 issue of Pravda, in Cyrillic, has a translation describing the Soyuz-4 and 5 flights. These and many more make the book’s overall arrangement simple but effective in learning of and sharing a grand experience.

The second half of the book continues on with a chapter devoted to each Apollo Moon mission and all their glory. The inserts continue to breathe freshness into the book, whether of a quote for the life insurance for the crew of Apollo 11, the flight director’s log for Apollo 13, or of a postcard that plots the traverse accomplished by the crew of Apollo 16. The last chapters nicely conclude the book by reviewing Skylab, the space shuttle and China’s Shenzhou program. The final chapter sums it all up with its dreams of a Moonbase built jointly through the aid of Ares, Soyuz, Ariane and Shenzou programs, all without the impetus of a race.

This book’s key attractions, aside from its subject, are the many stand alone reproductions of period paperwork. These, together with the completeness of the review, make this book a superb teaching resource. The many brief chapters would mesh well with the short attention span of young students. And, as Gene Kranz well says in the foreword, “…my hope is that a new generation of explorers will once again find the leadership, the spirit and the courage to boldly go forward and complete what we started. This book is a meaningful step in that direction”.

Perhaps surprisingly, there’s nothing but paper media. No audio or video material is hiding in any CD. This makes the book a standalone resource but it misses the opportunity of using a powerful, efficient delivery method.

The Apollo Moon program arose from the accumulation of many providential, disparate reasons. The end result was a success perhaps beyond the dreams of many of the early rocketeers. Yet, we did place humans on the Moon and Rod Pyle’s book “Missions to the Moon” allows a reader to glimpse the work, tears and laughter that accompanied the journey.

Posted on by Brian Ventrudo

NASA IBEX Spacecraft Detects Neutral Hydrogen Bouncing Off Moon

NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer has made the first detection of neutral atoms coming from the Moon (background image). The color-coded data toward the bottom shows the neutral particles and geometry measured at the Moon on Dec. 3, 2008.

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NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft has made the first observations of fast hydrogen atoms coming from the moon, following decades of speculation and searching for their existence.   Launched last October, the IBEX has a mission to image and map the dynamic interactions caused by the hot solar wind slamming into the cold expanse of space.  But as the IBEX team commissioned the spacecraft, they discovered the stream of neutral hydrogen atoms which are caused by the solar wind scattering off the moon’s surface.


The detector which made the discovery, called IBEX-Hi, was designed and built by the Southwest Research Institute and Los Alamos National Labs to measure particles moving at speeds of 0.5 million to 2.5 million miles an hour.

“Just after we got IBEX-Hi turned on, the moon happened to pass right through its field of view, and there they were,” says Dr. David J. McComas, IBEX principal investigator and assistant vice president of the SwRI Space Science and Engineering Division, where the IBEX-Hi particle detector was primarily built. “The instrument lit up with a clear signal of the neutral atoms being detected as they backscattered from the moon.”

The solar wind, the supersonic stream of charged particles that flows out from the sun, moves out into space in every direction at speeds of about a million mph. The Earth’s strong magnetic field shields our planet from the solar wind. The moon, with its relatively weak magnetic field, has no such protection, causing the solar wind to slam onto the moon’s sunward side.

From its vantage point in high earth orbit, IBEX sees about half of the moon — one quarter of it is dark and faces the nightside (away from the sun), while the other quarter faces the dayside (toward the sun). Solar wind particles impact only the dayside, where most of them are embedded in the lunar surface, while some scatter off in different directions. The scattered ones mostly become neutral atoms in this reflection process by picking up electrons from the lunar surface.

The IBEX team estimates that only about 10 percent of the solar wind ions reflect off the sunward side of the moon as neutral atoms, while the remaining 90 percent are embedded in the lunar surface. Characteristics of the lunar surface, such as dust, craters and rocks, play a role in determining the percentage of particles that become embedded and the percentage of neutral particles, as well as their direction of travel, that scatter.

McComas says the results also shed light on the “recycling” process undertaken by particles throughout the solar system and beyond. The solar wind and other charged particles impact dust and larger objects as they travel through space, where they backscatter and are reprocessed as neutral atoms. These atoms can travel long distances before they are stripped of their electrons and become ions and the complicated process begins again.

The combined scattering and neutralization processes now observed at the moon have implications for interactions with objects across the solar system, such as asteroids, Kuiper Belt objects and other moons. The plasma-surface interactions occurring within protostellar nebula, the region of space that forms around planets and stars — as well as exoplanets, planets around other stars — also can be inferred.

IBEX’s primary mission is to observe and map the complex interactions occurring at the edge of the solar system, where the million miles per hour solar wind runs into the interstellar material from the rest of the galaxy. The spacecraft carries the most sensitive neutral atom detectors ever flown in space, enabling researchers to not only measure particle energy, but also to make precise images of where they are coming from.

And the spacecraft is just getting started.  Towards the end of the summer, the team will release the spacecraft’s first all-sky map showing the energetic processes occurring at the edge of the solar system. The team will not comment until the image is complete, but McComas hints, “It doesn’t look like any of the models.”

The research was published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Source: Southwest Research Institute

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

LRO/LCROSS Ready for Launch to the Moon

The Atlas V with LRO and LCROSS at the pad. Credit: NASA

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NASA is going back to the Moon today! The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and a piggyback mission called the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) are at the launch pad, ready to blast off on an Atlas V today (Thursday June 18), with launch windows at 5:12 p.m., 5:22 p.m. or 5:32 p.m. EDT. (9:12, 9:22 or 9:32 GMT). The dual mission will provide detailed lunar maps to aid in returning humans to the moon, while searching for water ice in permanently shaded craters at the moon’s poles.

LRO is scheduled for a one-year prime mission, exploring the moon from a polar orbit of about 31 miles, or 50 kilometers, the closest any spacecraft has orbited the moon. Its primary objective is to conduct investigations to prepare for future explorations of the moon.

“LRO will circle the moon every two hours,” Craig Tooley, LRO project manager explained at a press briefing earlier this week. “As moon rotates, LRO will be able to see the entire surface, so every month, we will map the entire surface of moon. There will be gaps in our measurements because the view of the instruments are very narrow beneath the satellite ground track. Over the course of an entire year, we can fill in these gaps to have a global measurement of the moon and a new set of data, a new atlas so to speak showing temperature, minerals, images and other data.”

Artist concept of LRO in lunar orbit. Credit: NASA
Artist concept of LRO in lunar orbit. Credit: NASA

Tooley said that the Apollo missions accepted the risk of not knowing details of the landing sites. “They had safe landings, but we want to return to moon with repeated landings and have a higher degree of safety.”

LRO will be able to look at the distribution of rocks, boulders, and craters, with its 50 cm spatial resolution camera. “We’ll be able to see small boulders and know where it is safe to land,” said Rich Vondrak, project scientist. “NASA has identified fifty high priority sites that are potential landing sites for astronauts.”

LRO has a Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) and a Wide Angle Camera (WAC). NAC is dedicated to high resolution, and Vondrak said the high priority regions will be mapped in high res the first year, and they are working with science community for areas to study during an extended mission.

The Lunar Oribter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) will provide a high resolution 3-D relief map of moon. “LOLA resolution will be 10 times better than what we currently have,” said Vondrak. “We’re looking forward to mapping Aiken Basin, a huge depression, very carefully, and the polar regions are of high interest. We’ll have new eyes on the moon to get new views to prepare for future exploration of the moon.”

Regions near the pole have nearly continuous sunlight, which could be a source of warmth and power for future explorers. There are also regions inside polar craters that are continuously dark and very cold, and previous missions have found evidence of hydrogen, which scientists expect to be associated with water ice, a potential resource for future explorers.

“We’ll do the best possible attempt of determining the characteristic of the lunar surface from orbit, but to really understand the water content of the surface, you would like to land there,” said Vondrak. “We are fortunate that LRO will carry a companion mission, LCROSS, to seek water on the moon.”

Artist concept of LCROSS and Centaur stage heading for impact. Credit: NASA
Artist concept of LCROSS and Centaur stage heading for impact. Credit: NASA

LCROSS will search for water ice on the moon by sending the spent upper-stage Centaur rocket to impact part of a polar crater in permanent shadows. LCROSS will fly into the plume of dust left by the impact and measure the properties before also colliding with the lunar surface.

“LCROSS will shepherd the Centaur to the precise orbit, and accelerate it into the moon,” said LCROSS project scientist Tony Colaprete. “The two will separate, with LCROSS following the Centaur by four minutes, taking live “bent pipe” meausrments, sendin back live video (which will be shown live via webcast) taking measurements of the lunar regolith characteristics, looking for lunar water vapor or ice characteristics, then impacting the lunar surface itself. LCROSS will be a smashing success.”

The impact will take place about 100 days after launch, and the science team hopes to recruit amateur astronomers and students to help watch the impact from Earth. “This should be very engaging for the public, and their observations will help us, too,” said Colaprete.

If launch slips to Friday, June 19, the launch opportunities would be 6:41 p.m., 6:51 p.m. and 7:01 p.m EDT (10:41, 10;51 and 11:01 GMT).

Several videos about LRO and LCROSS.

Follow LRO’s Launch Blog.

Watch KSC video feeds of launch prep and launch.

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

World’s First Spaceport Begins Construction

Spaceport America designed by URS/Foster + partners. Conceptual image courtesy Vyonyx Ltd.

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The western United States used to be known as the frontier, and now that region will provide access to the final frontier. On June 19, ground will be broken in New Mexico for Spaceport America, the world’s first commercial spaceport built for launching private citizens into space. Groundbreaking ceremonies will include a flyover by Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo, the mothership that will send tourists on their way to space in SpaceShip2. Virgin Galactic will be the first – if not most important — tenant of Spaceport America, and already more than 250 people have put money down to take trips to the edge of space as early as next year.

Spaceport America’s runway is scheduled to be completed next summer. The terminal and hangar should be ready for tenants in December 2010, when Virgin Galactic hopes to begin taking tourists to space.

White knight Two. Credit: FlightGlobal.com.
White knight Two. Credit: FlightGlobal.com.

Competitors such as XCOR Aerospace and Armadillo Aerospace are developing spacecraft for $95,000 flights. And as flights become more routine, costs should drop.

Five miles from the terminal is a launching pad for 20-foot rockets used mostly for science experiments, which has been operational for the past two years.

If you are in the Las Cruces/ Truth or Consequences, New Mexico area, check out Spaceport America’s website. The groundbreaking ceremonies are free and open to the public.

Source: AP, Spaceport America

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

ISS Now Visible in Daytime!

The International Space Station seen during the day. Credit: Spaceweather.com

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Oh wow! I love satellite watching, and especially the International Space Station, but now I don’t have to wait for nightfall anymore. We reported that the ISS had become the second brightest object in the night sky back in March 2009 with the addition of the final set of solar arrays. And now its been confirmed that the space station, under the right conditions, can be visible during the day, too. “On June 13th, I was watching a red-headed woodpecker’s nest when the ISS passed overhead,” said Brooke O’Klatner of Charlotte, North Carolina, who took this image, which was posted on Spaceweather.com.

And the ISS will get even brighter when the STS-127 mission arrives, hopefully in July (liftoff has been re-scheduled for July 11 after being postponed today because of a hydrogen leak.) The mission will add an addition on to the Kibo lab, and with Endeavour attached to the station, it will be quite bright. Can’t wait! In the meantime, I’m going to test out my best eagle eyes and try to see the ISS during the day. If anyone is able to see it during a daytime pass, let us know! (Pictures encouraged!)

Posted on by Nancy Atkinson

Exoplanet Has Oddball Orbit

XO-3b's eccentric orbit. Credit: New Scientist

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In what might be a evidence of planetary billiards, astronomers have found an exoplanet with an extremely odd orbit. The question is, was this planet the cue ball or the object ball? While most planets orbit around a star’s mid-section, this one – called XO-3b — is tilted about 37 degrees from the star’s equator. It’s also a massive planet, about 10 times the size of Jupiter. Such a misalignment must have occurred as a result of a disturbance, such as a collision with another object, sometime after the planet’s formation. But astronomers say they don’t yet know what caused the unusual orbit of XO-3b.

Detecting this oddball orbit required a combination of good luck, advanced technology and ingenious methodology. The planet was discovered back in 2007 using the transit method by measuring how the star is dimmed by the planet passing in through the line-of-sight between Earth and the star.

Joshua Winn explains the planet XO-3b's tilted orbit. Credit: MIT
Joshua Winn explains the planet XO-3b's tilted orbit. Credit: MIT

Using the Keck I telescope, detecting the planet itself was relatively easy, as it dimmed the star’s light by about 1 percent. But to go one step further and measure the angle of its orbit, meant that “we have to be sneaky about it,” said MIT physicist Joshua Winn, who led the team that measured the planet’s tilted orbit. It turns out that if a planet crosses the star’s disk at an angle to the star’s own rotation, it causes a distinctive pattern of change in the overall color of the star, as measured by a highly sensitive spectrograph, because of the Doppler shifts caused by the star’s rotation.

Hints of such a spectral signature were seen last year by another team, but that team acknowledged that they could not be confident of their result. The new observations, carried out by Winn and his team in February at the Keck I Observatory in Hawaii, provided a clear, solid measurement of the planet’s distinctive tilt, determining the angle of the orbit to be about 37 degrees from the star’s equator. The results are reported in a paper in the Astrophysical Journal, which was recently posted online and will be published in the journal’s August issue.

A majority of the exoplanet discovered so far are very large planets comparable to the gas giants in our solar system, but orbiting their stars much closer in (and thus faster). That’s because the method used to detect these planets makes it much easier to detect such close-in giants than smaller or more distant ones. In the case of XO-3b, it is about 13 times as massive as Jupiter, yet orbits its star with a period, or “year,” of just 3.5 days (Jupiter, by contrast, takes almost 12 years for an orbit). That size and closeness to its star are “unusual, even by the standards of exoplanets,” Winn says.

A collision between planets,like the one illustrated, could have caused the odd orbit of XO-3b. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A collision between planets,like the one illustrated, could have caused the odd orbit of XO-3b. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Such “hot Jupiters” – so named because they resemble the solar system’s largest planet, but would be much hotter because of their proximity to their parent stars – could not have formed in the places they are seen now, according to accepted planet-formation theory. They must have formed much further out from the star, then migrated inward to their present positions. Astronomers have come up with different mechanisms to account for the migration: the gravitational attraction of other planets as they passed close by, or the attraction of the disk of dust and gas from which the star and its planets formed.

Close encounters with other planets could greatly amplify a slight initial tilt, but attraction from the disk of material could not. Likely, a cataclysmic event occurred in this planet’s past.

Read the team’s paper.

Source: MIT

Posted on by Fraser Cain

Spaceflight

Spaceflight
A close-up of Atlantis during launch. Credit: NASA

Even before man had managed to take to the skies on our planet, he had thought of spaceflight and soaring through the skies of the planets that he could see. As soon as the Montgolfier brothers had successfully launched their first hot air balloon a race began to see who could fly untethered, then into space. That race for spaceflight never let up. Yuri Gagarin and the Soviet space program arrived first, but the Americans were close behind and were committed to one-up-manship.

Tackling all of the spaceflight articles on the internet would take a dozen researchers a lifetime. Of course, you do not have that kind of time or patience, so we have assembled links to all of the articles that we have here on Universe Today related to the topic. We do not expect you to just dive in blind, so here are a few fun facts about spaceflight.

The average space suit costs a little over $12 million(U.S.). Not bad for an outfit that can protect you from a meteorite.

There are 13,000 detectable pieces of space junk…left over pieces and parts from space repairs, broken down satellites, etc. Where ever man goes, garbage seems to accumulate. Some of this junk managed to destroy at least one satellite.

We are on the cusp of full blown space tourism. The ultrarich have been buying trips on space shuttle missions for years, but there are at least two companies that have tested commercial spacecraft.

Many of today’s modern rockets are a variation of the German V2 rocket.

There are hundreds of interesting facts about spaceflight in the links below. Everything from space food to space tourism and the different mission launched by various space agencies. Hopefully, you will find everything that you need and, as always, enjoy your research.