National Space Day, dedicates the first Friday in May, to the extraordinary achievements, benefits, and opportunities in the exploration and use of space. The goal of the observance is to promote math, science, technology, and engineering education in young people, The hope is to inspire them to pursue a career in science, especially a career in space-related jobs.
- Of all the planets in our solar system (apart from Earth), Mars is the one most likely to be hospitable to life. In 1986, NASA found what they thought may be fossils of microscopic living things in a rock recovered from Mars.
- The sheer size of space makes it impossible to accurately predict just how many stars we have. Right now, scientists and astronomers use the number of stars only within our galaxy, The Milky Way, to estimate. That number is between 200-400 billion stars and there are estimated to be billions of galaxies so the stars in space really are completely uncountable.
- Halleys comet won’t orbit past earth again until 2061. Discovered in 1705 by Edmond Halley, the famous comet was last seen in 1986 and is only seen once every 75 to 76 years.
- Nobody knows how many stars are in space. The sheer size of space makes it impossible to accurately predict just how many stars we have. Right now, scientists and astronomers use the number of stars only within our galaxy, The Milky Way, to estimate. That number is between 200-400 billion stars.
- A full NASA space suit costs $12,000,000.
- The Moon has no atmosphere, which means there is no wind to erode the surface and no water to wash the footprints away. This means the footprints of the Apollo astronauts, along with spacecraft prints, rover-prints and discarded material, will be there for millions of years.
- Uranus is tilted on its side.
- Jupiter’s moon Io has towering volcanic eruptions
- There is floating water in space. Astronomers have found a massive water vapor cloud which holds 140 trillion times the mass of water in the Earth’s oceans somewhere around 10 billion light years away – making it the largest discovery of water ever found.
- Spacecraft have visited every planet
- One million Earths could fit inside the sun – and the sun is considered an average-size star.
- Comets are leftovers from the creation of our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago – they consist of sand, ice and carbon dioxide.
- You wouldn’t be able to walk on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus or Neptune because they have no solid surface!
- An asteroid about the size of a car enters Earth’s atmosphere roughly once a year – but it burns up before it reaches us.
- The sunset on Mars appears blue.
- Planet names:
- Mercury: The Romans knew of seven bright objects in the sky: the Sun, the Moon, and the five brightest planets. They named them after their most important gods. Because Mercury was the fastest planet as it moved around the Sun, it was named after the Roman messenger god Mercury. Mercury was also the god of travelers. According to myth, he had a winged hat and sandals, so he could fly.
- Venus, the brightest planet in the night sky, was named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty and is the only planet named after a female.
- Earth: All of the planets, except for Earth, were named after Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. The name Earth is an English/German name which simply means the ground. It comes from the Old English words ‘eor(th)e’ and ‘ertha’. In German, it is ‘erde’.
- Mars, the red planet, was named after this god of war
- Jupiter: The Romans named the planet after their king of gods, Jupiter, who was also the god of the sky and of thunder.
- Saturn was named after the Roman god of agriculture.
- More energy from the sun hits Earth every hour than the planet uses in a year.
- If two pieces of the same type of metal touch in space, they will bond and be permanently stuck together
- If you could stand at the Martian equator, the temperature at your feet would be like a warm spring day, but at your head it would be freezing cold!
- The radio signal that a spacecraft uses to contact Earth has no more power than a refrigerator light bulb. And by the time the signal has traveled across space, the signal is only one-billionth of one-billionth of one watt!
- To detect those tiny signals from space, the Deep Space Network uses dish antennas with diameters of up to 70 meters (230 feet). That’s almost as big as a football field.
- More than 1,300 Earths would fit into Jupiter’s vast sphere.
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