• Nearly every star ever spotted has at least one planet. About 20% of the stars that are about the same size as our Sun have an Earth-size planet circling in the “Goldilocks” zone capable of sustaining life.
• Light takes 1.3 seconds to travel from Earth to the Moon. However, communicating with people on the Moon also takes 1.3 seconds because information travels at the speed of light.
• Information takes about 7 minutes to travel to and from Mars.
• Nothing that has any mass can travel at the speed of light.
• The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 lightyears wide. The neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, is approximately 2.5 million lightyears away.
• It costs between $2,300 and $6,800 per pound ($5,000-$15,000/kg) to launch stuff into orbit. This is the main reason behind the fact that we don’t have space hotels and moon bases.
• One of the largest stars known is called UY Scuti. Its radius is around 1,700 times larger than the radius of the Sun. To put that in perspective, nearly 5 billion of our Suns could fit inside UY Scuti.
• An Apollo mission to the Moon retrieved a camera that had been left there for several years. When it was examined back on Earth, scientists found it was crawling with Earth-bacteria, which had been on it when it left Earth, and had survived all the years on the Moon. It had not been sterilized before going to the Moon because everyone thought that no bacteria could survive on the Moon. Now NASA sterilizes every inch of every spacecraft.
• Venus probably looked a lot like Earth about 2 billion years ago.
• The weight of the atmosphere on Venus is equal to being about half a mile underwater on Earth. The average temperature on Venus is around 860 F (460 C). It’s so hot that metals melt and turn to gas, rising up in the atmosphere, where they cool down and fall as metal snow.
• Galileo was among the first to see many moons circling Jupiter. His observations led him to believe that the Sun did not in fact circle Earth, but that Earth circled the Sun. This angered the Pope, who forced him to retract the statement, and Galileo subsequently spent the rest of his life under house arrest for his blasphemy.
• One of Jupiter’s moons called Europa sports fabulous geysers that shoot water 120 miles (200 km) high.
• The term “UFO” was coined by the U.S. Air Force in the 1940s and denotes anything seen in the sky that cannot be easily explained.
• The space probe Voyager 2, launched in 1977 and travelling at 35,000 mph (56,327 km/hr) has travelled 4.4 billion miles since leaving Earth. A light-day is just over 16 billion miles. So Voyager 2 has travelled about a quarter of a light-day so far, or around 6 light-hours. At this rate it will have travelled one light-day by around the year 2157.
• The breathable part of our atmosphere (roughly 2 miles worth) is all that separates us from suffocation and death in space. In the grand scope of things, 2 miles (3.2 km) is a sliver of nothing.
• Only 24 men have made it past low earth orbit. Only 12 managed to walk on the Moon. All of them were from the United States
• Jupiter has been dubbed the “vacuum cleaner of the solar system” because its gravitational force eats up asteroids or comets that are nearby, stopping them from colliding with Earth.
