Dr. Michael Griffin is the current Administrator of NASA. He has seven degrees including Masters degrees in Aerospace Science, Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Applied Physics, and Civil Engineering. He also has an MBA and a PhD in Aerospace Engineering!
As a result, his full salutation is Prof. Dr. Michael Griffin BSc,MSc,MEng,MBA,Ph.D!
The US was the 1st nation to put a man on
the moon.
The USSR had the following:
1st orbital spacecraft,
Sputnik
1st spacecraft to carry an animal (a dog Laika), Sputnik 2
1st spacecraft to reach another celestial body, Luna 2
1st spacecraft to photograph the far side of the moon, Luna
3
1st spacecraft to land safely on another planet, Venera 7
1st manned spacecraft, Vostok 1, which carried the ...
1st human into space (Yuri Gagarin)
The NASA rovers on Mars have lasted seven times as long as they were intended to.
NASA's robotic space explorers, the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, have survived for a full Martian year (687 Earth days) on the red planet!
When Spirit first landed on Jan. 3, 2004, scientists hoped that the rovers would last 90 sols, a Martian days which is just a few minutes longer than an Earth day.
There are gold-plated records flying away
from Earth towards aliens on both the NASA Voyager 1 and
Voyager 2 spacecraft (launched in 1977). These contain information
on finding our Solar System and planet, images of culture and
diversity on Earth, and greetings in a LOT of different languages.
How to actually communicate with aliens.
These craft passed Pluto in 1990 and are now roughly 8 billion
miles from the sun (90 times farther than the Earth).
At a cost of $1.5B and the size of a school bus, the Hubble Space telescope was launched in 1990.
Using its 94.5-inch primary mirror, Hubble transmits about 120 gigabytes of data every week! This mirror is such a smooth curve that if it was scaled up to the diameter of the Earth, the largest bump would only be 6 inches tall.
Take a look at some of the beautiful pictures Hubble has brought us!
The universe is so vast in relation to the
matter it contains that it can be compared with a building twenty
miles long, twenty miles wide, and twenty miles high that contains
only a single grain of sand.
The space shuttle lands at a slope 6-7 times steeper than commercial airplanes!
Commercial airplanes descend for landing at a "glide slope" of approximately 3 degrees, while the space shuttle glide slope is angled at 20 degrees or more. Four minutes before touching down, the shuttle is still piloted by computer and moving faster than the speed of sound.
The asteroid "3554 Amun" will cross the Earth's orbit in 2020. It contains (at today's prices) roughly $8 trillion worth of iron and nickel, $6 trillion of cobalt, and $6 trillion of platinum-like metals.
In other words, whoever owns Amun could become 450 times as wealthy as Bill Gates.
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| Source: "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
December 31, 2005
| Astronomy
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Pluto is the only planet in the solar system that has never been visited by a spacecraft.
On January 11, 2006, NASA is scheduled to launch the New Horizons mission. It should reach the planet, which is only 1/150th the volume of Earth, by mid-2015. After completing the 3-billion mile journey, the spacecraft will map Pluto and Charon, its moon.
The total amount of radiation energy from outside the solar collected by all the radio telescopes on Earth since collecting began (in 1951) is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.
Starting with Apollo 11 in 1969 ("One small step for man...") and ending with Apollo 17 in 1972, NASA fulfilled the vision that Jules Verne had speculated about over 100 years ago!
In 2029, the 1,000-foot (320 meters) asteroid 99942 Apophis (2004 MN4) will whiz by Earth at a distance of about 18,600 miles (30,000 kilometers). That’s about as close as many geosynchronous satellites.
It will swing by the Earth again in either 2035 or 2036, and scientists predict it has a small chance of hitting the planet on this pass.
Several variants of this do occur in the series, such as "Beam me aboard," or "Two to beam up", but "Beam me up, Scotty" was never said during the run of the original Star Trek series.
The movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home included the closest other variation: "Scotty, beam me up."
After landing on the moon on July 20, 1969 with the Apollo 11 mission, NASA proposed four major projects:
A space station
A space shuttle
A permanent base on the moon
A manned mission to Mars
All of these projects were cancelled except for the space shuttle which passed Congress by only 1 vote! As of August 9th, 2005, the space shuttle ("Shuttle Transport System" or "STS") has now completed over 100 missions in 25 years of service.
The inside of the Earth is spinning faster than the rest of it.
According to a new study, the inner core of Earth spins nine-thousandths of a second faster than outer layers of the Earth, which may be responsible for the Earth's magnetic field.
The Sun contains more than 99.8% of the mass in the solar system -- Jupiter contains most of the rest.
Every second, the Sun converts about 700 million tons of hydrogen to 695 million tons of helium and 386 billion billion megawatts of energy (see also e=mc2 fact). It's been doing this for about 4.5 billion years and will keep going for another 5 billion years before growing to a red giant and gobbling up the Earth.
"2003 UB313" could be bigger than Pluto and is probably twice the distance from the Sun. See the fact about the relationship between days of the week and the planets.
Earth's atmosphere has no sharp boundary or upper edge. But 99% of it does lie below about 30 kilometers (19 miles). Air pressure and density continue to decrease as altitude increases and the atmosphere dwindles into the near vacuum of space.
The lowest satellite orbit is about 160 kilometers (100 miles) up. At this altitude, there is virtually no drag from air molecules to slow the satellite. In order for a satellite to remain over the same part of the earth (like a weather or TV satellite), it needs to be in a geostationary orbit (22,240 miles above the earth!)
Its presence is required to explain the extra gravitational force that is observed to hold regular galaxies together and that also binds large clusters of galaxies. These galaxies are rotatating too quickly to be explained by the observed amount of gas. Something else must serve as gravitational glue.
Dark matter makes up about 23 percent of the universe's mass-energy budget. Normal matter, the stuff of stars, planets and people, contributes just 4 percent -- similar to the grain of sand fact.
We're landing a probe (Huygens) on Titan, one of Saturn's moons, for the first time on January 14, 2005. It's riding aboard the Cassini spacecraft - check out the view.
The names of the seven days of the week
were based on the names of the celestial objects originally
considered to be planets: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury,
Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn.
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