40 Really Interesting Facts about Space Exploration

Here are some very interesting facts about space exploration! SAFIR, a planned cryogenic space telescope, is scheduled to launch in 2015 with the goal of studying “the creation of the earliest stars and galaxies” in deep space. This article will share many more interesting facts about space exploration like these.

The telescope will be 1000 times more sensitive than the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory, two existing telescope satellites. NASA wants to learn about black holes, galaxy creation and development, and star system formation in the distant reaches of space via SAFIR.

From signals, capturing and arranging material like Yuri Gagarin’s selfie in space or the image The Blue Marble, to drawings like the first one in space by cosmonaut and artist Alexei Leonov, interesting facts about space exploration, music videos like Chris Hadfield’s cover of Space Oddity on board the International Space Station, and permanent installations on celestial bodies like the Moon, art in and from space spans the spectrum.

Human participation and representation in space have been a problem from the beginning of space exploration. International space law has secured certain rights for non-space faring countries, calling space the “domain of all mankind” and understanding spaceflight as a resource, interesting facts about space exploration, however sharing space for all humankind is still condemned as imperialist and inadequate. In addition to worldwide inclusiveness, women and people of color have been underrepresented. In recent years, groups like the Justspace Alliance and the IAU featured Inclusive Astronomy have been created in order to achieve a more inclusive spaceflight.

The employment of space technology to propel spacecraft into and across space is known as spaceflight, interesting facts about space exploration.

Spaceflight is utilized for both scientific and commercial purposes, such as space tourism and satellite telecommunications. Space observatories, reconnaissance satellites, and other Earth observation satellites are examples of non-commercial applications of spaceflight, interesting facts about space exploration.

A space mission usually starts with a rocket launch, which provides the initial energy needed to overcome gravity and push the spacecraft away from Earth’s surface, interesting facts about space exploration. Astrodynamics is the study of a spacecraft’s motion after it is in orbit, both while it is unpropelled and when it is powered.

Some spacecraft remain in orbit forever, while others disintegrate upon reentry into the atmosphere, interesting facts about space exploration, and yet others reach the surface of a planet or moon for landing or collision.

Interesting facts about space exploration

1. The first animal in space was launched on November 3, 1957. The first live thing to circle the Earth was Laika, a stray husky-spitz cross. In addition, she was the first fatality in the Space Age. Laika entered orbit alive on Sputnik 2 – and orbited the Earth in 103 minutes, according to papers from the National Air and Space Museum. Following the loss of the heat shield on the fourth orbit, the temperature inside the capsule rose beyond 90 degrees, and Laika perished shortly after. For the next five months, the capsule remained in orbit.

2. On September 15, 1968, a Soviet spacecraft became the first to circle the moon. Zond 5, a Russian spacecraft, was the first to circle the moon and return to Earth. Turtles, mealworms, seeds, microbes, and other living things were aboard the Zond 5. All of the biological passengers were safely retrieved when the spaceship landed in the Indian Ocean. The mission was viewed as a test run for manned lunar landings.

3. On June 18, 1983, she became the first American woman to go into space. About 20 years after Soviet cosmonaut Tereshkova became the first woman in orbit, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. The ride was one of NASA’s first six female astronauts, holding a Ph.D. in physics. She flew into space aboard the Challenger space shuttle. Two shuttle flights would be required for the ride. In-flight, she was in charge of the shuttle’s robotic arm, among other things.

4. Have you ever wondered why the stars sparkle but the planets don’t? Then this truth about space is for you. The fact is that you wouldn’t see stars twinkling if you were in space. Only the Earth’s atmosphere causes this phenomenon. When a star’s pinpoint-sized light enters our atmosphere, it is refracted, sending it skittering out in a zigzag pattern. That’s what we see as a sparkle. Planets, on the other hand, look far larger to us than pinpoints, so even though their light zigzags and zags as it reaches our atmosphere, the motions balance out and we only perceive a constant glow.

5. The first living being in orbit in 1957, the first human spaceflight (Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1) in 1961, the first spacewalk (Alexei Leonov) on March 18, 1965, the first automatic landing on another celestial body in 1966, and the launch of the first space station (Salyut 1) in 1971 were all achieved by the Soviet space program. After the first 20 years of exploration, the focus turned away from one-off missions and toward renewable hardware, such as the Space Shuttle program, and away from rivalry and toward collaboration, as with the International Space Station (ISS).

6. On April 28, 2001, the first space tourist was launched. Dennis Tito, a multimillionaire businessman from California, became the first paying passenger to go into space, allowing space flight to be commercialized. Tito paid a whopping $20 million for the honor. He launched from Kazakhstan on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft for an eight-day journey to the International Space Station.

7. Metal things stay together in space. This is due to a technique called “cold welding.” Because of the oxygen in our atmosphere, this does not occur on Earth.

8. The average global temperature is 58.6 degrees Fahrenheit (17.8 degrees Celsius). Meanwhile, the hottest planet in our solar system, Venus, has a temperature of 842 degrees Fahrenheit (or 450 degrees Celsius). It’s not hot enough to melt steel; for that, you’d need 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. However, it is hot enough to melt lead and much hotter than any life we know of can withstand. According to BBC Earth, extremeophiles on our planet can survive and flourish at temperatures as high as 206 degrees Fahrenheit—at least, that’s the highest temperature scientists have yet observed. The fact that Venus isn’t even the nearest planet to the sun (that honor goes to Mercury) adds to the strangeness of its heat. However, its extremely thick atmosphere absorbs greenhouse gases, making it a sweltering hotspot. This is the distance between the Earth and the Sun, in case you were wondering.

9. When two pieces of the same sort of metal come into contact in space, they bond and become permanently attached. Cold welding is the name for this incredible effect. Because the atoms of separate bits of metal have no means of understanding that they are distinct, the lumps merge together. This would not happen on Earth since the components are separated by air and water. The phenomenon has a lot of implications for spaceship design and metal-based building in vacuums in the future.

10. The International Space Station is the most costly building ever built, costing $150 billion.

11. In space, astronauts can grow up to 2 inches! This is due to the fact that when there is less gravity, our spine lengthens.

12. We have no clue how big the cosmos is or how many stars there are. Right now, we’re counting stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, based on our best guess. We next multiply that number by our best estimate of the universe’s total number of galaxies. After all of that arithmetic, NASA can confidently state that there are zillions upon zillions of uncountable stars. Any uncountable number is referred to like a zillion. According to research conducted by the Australian National University, their estimate is 70 sextillion.

13. Every hour, the sun sends more energy to Earth than the planet needs in a year. For the past 15 years, the usage of solar energy has risen at a pace of 20% each year. According to Yale Environment 360, the globe installed 30% more solar energy capacity in 2017, resulting in the production of 98.9 gigawatts of solar energy. Despite its seeming size, this quantity of energy only amounts to 0.7 percent of global yearly power use.

14. The axis rotation of Venus is incredibly sluggish, taking roughly 243 Earth days to complete one full cycle. Surprisingly, Venus takes even less time than Earth to complete one cycle around the sun — 226 days to be exact.

15. The star Thuban, also known as Alpha Draconis, was thought to be the North Star around 3,000 B.C. The star Vega will become the new North Star in around 13,000 years, but Polaris will return to its former position in 26,000 years as the Earth continues to precess.

16. On May 25, 1961, Kennedy gave a speech about space exploration. President John F. Kennedy made a speech to both chambers of Congress a few weeks after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, pledging the country to space exploration. Kennedy’s vision for a bold space program envisioned putting Americans on the moon and safely returning them to Earth by the end of the decade, among other goals.

17. Perseverance will dig into Mars’ surface for a year (about two Earth years) to gather rocks, hunt for water, and figure out the planet’s weather. While we wait for further information from NASA, check out some other fascinating facts about the cosmos that scientists already know but you definitely don’t.

18. For astronauts, NASA is creating 3D-printed pizza.

19. We’re used to calculate distances in minutes, hours, and days here on Earth—for example, a 10-minute stroll to the store or a 40-minute drive to the beach. Because of the immensity of space, we must estimate the time it takes to travel by years or, in many cases, light-years. Of course, anyone who isn’t an astronaut or a millionaire will be unable to board a rocket for the foreseeable future. So, you want to walk to the moon? The 239,000-mile journey would take you nine years. How about a trip to Proxima Centauri, the closest star? You’d get there in 356 billion years if you kept the pedal to the metal at 70 mph.

20. A human might theoretically live up to 90 seconds in space without a spacesuit, however, you would very probably pass out much before that.

21. On Earth, we must apply heat until the metals reach their melting temperatures in order to fuse two pieces of metal together. In space, however, no heat—or, for that matter, any action—is necessary to make two metal pieces stay together indefinitely. Cold welding is a process that occurs when metal particles move over one other and wear away the protective oxide coatings that prevent them from fusing on Earth. In space, however, that shielding vanishes, and the electrons from one piece of metal flow into the other, fusing them together. Take a look at some additional science facts you probably didn’t learn in school.

22. Even if you cry in space, your tears will not fall. They’ll just stay there. Then you’ll drift away.

23. Cockroaches were the first animals to be born in space. They developed quicker and stronger than their Earthbound cousins, according to the Russians.

24. Any human-made object circling Earth that no longer serves a useful purpose is referred to as space trash. Scientists believe that there are around 500,000 bits of space junk in orbit now, including rocket and satellite debris, as well as commonplace objects like spanners lost during the building of the International Space Station!

25. More stars exist in the cosmos than there are grains of sand on all of Earth’s beaches combined. That’s more than a billion trillion dollars!

26. On August 10, 1990, a conference called Mapping Venus was organized. The radar technology on NASA’s Magellan mission was used to survey the surface of Venus. The mission’s goal was to research land formations, plate tectonics, and erosion. The spacecraft was also charged with creating a model of Venus’ innards. The expedition of Magellan revealed that Venus had no evidence of Earth-like plate tectonics and that volcanic lava flow covered 85 percent of the planet’s surface, with the remaining mountain formations.

27. Massive stars burst and die, resulting in the birth of neutron stars. They’re very thick—so dense, in fact, that a teaspoon of them would weigh one billion tons, according to Space.com. What would the total weight be? Each is 12-and-a-half miles in circumference, so you can figure it out with some fast arithmetic. (Or don’t, because it’ll most likely make your brain hurt.) In addition, the gravity of these stars is 2 billion times greater than that of Earth. The fact that they spin at 43,000 times per second, put in motion by the explosion that created them, is probably the most astonishing space fact about them. That pace, on the other hand, slows down over time.

28. The fact that Venus isn’t even the nearest planet to the sun (that honor goes to Mercury) adds to the strangeness of its heat. However, its extremely thick atmosphere absorbs greenhouse gases, making it a sweltering hotspot. This is the distance between the Earth and the Sun, in case you were wondering.

29. On Mars, the sunset seems to be blue. Now it’s time to put the dirt on our solar system’s planets to one pretty nasty rhythm! A word of caution: you may find yourself humming the tune in your mind all day!

30. We’re accustomed to thinking of volcanoes as erupting hot molten lava since that’s how they work on Earth. A volcano in space, on the other hand, can spew water, methane, or ammonia, which, according to Quartz, freeze when they erupt and transform into frozen vapor and “volcanic snow.” These occurrences, known as cryovolcanoes, are very frequent. They may be found on Pluto, Saturn’s moon Titan, and Jupiter’s moons Europa and Io, the latter of which is particularly active, with hundreds of vents, some of which NASA spacecraft have filmed erupting in real-time, with plumes of frozen vapor stretching more than 250 miles. Nobody knows for sure what produces cryovolcanoes, however, a strong gravitational pull might play a role.

31. A medium is required for sound waves to pass through. The area between stars will always remain hauntingly silent since there is no atmosphere in the vacuum of space. However, worlds with atmospheres and air pressure allow sound to travel, which is why there is so much noise on Earth and, most likely, on other planets.

32. The asteroid, which is also known as a dwarf planet, has a diameter of about 600 miles. It’s the biggest asteroid in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, accounting for a third of the belt’s total mass. Ceres has a surface area that is roughly comparable to that of India or Argentina. Dawn, an unmanned spacecraft that orbited Ceres and helped us completely change our view of the Earth, just completed its mission.

33. On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space and safely return to Earth, beating the United States by several weeks. Gagarin went at 17,000 miles per hour on board the Vostok 1 spacecraft and completed a 108-minute orbit around the planet. The launch of Sputnik and the success of placing a man in space were two shocks to American pride that ratcheted up the space race rivalry. Alan Shepard piloted the Freedom 7 spacecraft on a 15-minute suborbital mission that achieved a maximum height of 116 miles and a high speed of 5,180 mph. Shepard was also able to take control of his spacecraft for brief periods of time, unlike Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin, whose capsule was automatically controlled.

34. While Perseverance is learning more about our nearest neighbor, there’s one fascinating space fact about Mars that we already know: it has the biggest valley—or, more accurately, a series of canyons—that we’ve discovered thus far. It’s called the Valles Marineris, and it’s 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) long, which is ten times the length of our beloved Grand Canyon, according to Space.com. Mariner 9 was the first to detect it in 1971. What went wrong? On the other side of the canyon ridge, there might be a bank of volcanoes.

35. On August 1, 1989, Voyager 2 broadcasts pictures from Neptune. Voyager 2 was designed to explore the solar system’s furthest reaches, which included the planet, Neptune. The spacecraft is the first and only human-made object to visit the planet. Voyager 2 discovered five moons and four rings surrounding Neptune during its voyage. Triton, Neptune’s biggest moon, was revealed to be the coldest known planetary body in the solar system. With winds topping 680 kilometers per hour, the planet was much more active than previously thought. The most abundant element in the atmosphere was hydrogen.

36. Following STS-133 in March 2011, the ISS was nearly completed, but the US’s intentions for space exploration are still in flux. An expert assessment group reported in 2009 that the Bush Administration’s Constellation program for a return to the Moon by 2020 was underfunded and impractical.

37. Over the last few decades, Jupiter’s famed Red Spot has shrunk. This location on the globe is home to a massive whirling maelstrom the size of three Earths. According to current estimates, just one Earth can fit inside space. Surprisingly, the storm is actually becoming higher in length as it narrows in width. Scientists are still baffled as to why this phenomenon is occurring in the first place, although some speculate that it has something to do with Jupiter’s jet streams changing direction or position.

38. The sun rises every 117 Earth days on Venus, which implies that the sun rises just twice a year, yet both times are technically on the same day. The sun will rise in the west and set in the east because Venus spins clockwise.

39. The moon of Saturn Phoebe is entirely black and further away from Saturn than Iapetus, and it rotates around Saturn clockwise, “emitting a continuous stream of particles.” Iapetus revolves counterclockwise, therefore as the two circles pass one other, only one side of Iapetus is struck by the particles coming off of Phoebe. This helps to explain why Iapetus is only partly dark.

40. On October 4, 1957, Sputnik I was launched. Humanity’s first artificial satellite was launched by the Soviet Union, which kicked off the space race. The 23-inch-diameter sphere sent messages to Earth for 22 days before burning up in orbit on January 4, 1958. Sputnik’s launch jolted the United States, which feared a technological deficit with the Soviet Union, and proceeded to overhaul its scientific and engineering school. NASA was founded a year later.

We feel you have loved these interesting facts about space exploration!

40 Really Interesting Facts about Space Exploration

Interesting facts about space exploration

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