While performing the first space walk in human history, Alexey Leonov’s spacesuit inflated so much he couldn’t get back inside his space capsule. He had to let air out of his suit while still in the vacuum of space and was barely able to fit back through the airlock.
space
In 1990, the Galileo spacecraft…
In 1990, the Galileo spacecraft did a search for life on planet Earth during a flyby. It didn’t find any actual life but it did find evidence ‘strongly suggestive of life on Earth’.
When astronauts vote from space…
When astronauts vote from space, they list their address as “low-Earth orbit” in their absentee ballots. Yet recently North Dakota republicans wanted to essentially ban Native American’s from voting because many of them have no address on their IDs.
Most stars exist in binary or triple…
Most stars exist in binary or triple star systems. It is hypothesized that up to 85% of stars are gravitationally bound to another star in a multiple star system. Therefore, solitary stars (such as the Sun) are actually not the norm in the universe, but in fact are a rarity.
In 1995, NASA astronomer Bob Williams…
In 1995, NASA astronomer Bob Williams wanted to point the Hubble telescope at the darkest part of the sky for 100 hours. Critics said it was a waste of valuable time, and he’d have to resign if it came up blank. Instead it revealed over 3,000 galaxies, in an area 1/30th as wide as a full moon.
There is liquid…
There is liquid water on Mars. The watery area in question is about 20 kilometers in diameter, and while depth can’t be determined, the deposit would likely have to be at least a meter thick to produce the reflection observed. So at a bare minimum we’re probably looking at a serious quantity of water, on the order of millions of liters.
“It’s not anything you’d want to swim in — negative 80 degrees Fahrenheit, or negative 60 Celsius, and probably more of a thick sludge subsiding here and there into “brine pools.” If I’m not mistaken you’d probably also be crushed like a bug if you weren’t inside some kind of pressure vessel. Still — it’s liquid water. On Mars. Today.”
The International Space Station…
The International Space Station (ISS) can orbit “straight through” an aurora event. When it happened on 23 February 2016 Timothy Peake, a European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut aboard the ISS, said it was “eerie but very beautiful.”
In 1920, The New York Times ridiculed Robert…
In 1920, The New York Times ridiculed Robert H. Goddard and claimed that rockets could not function in space. On July 17, 1969, a day after the Apollo 11 launch, NYT formally acknowledged their error.
In Interstellar the depiction of a black hole…
In Interstellar the depiction of a black hole required completely new CGI rendering software and was so accurate that it provided enough scientifical insight to publish three scientific papers.
According to scientific predictions, the Milky…
According to scientific predictions, the Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy within 4 billion years, creating a hybrid galaxy dubbed “Milkomeda”.