2,000 pounds of space dust and other space debris fall on the Earth everyday. 99% of the solar system mass is concentrated in the sun. Astronauts are not allowed to eat beans before they go into space because passing wind in a spacesuit damages them. American astronauts must be under 6 feet. There are more stars in the sky then grains of sand on earth. Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise. In space you cannot cry because there is no gravity to make the tears flow. Any free moving liquid in outer space will form itself into a sphere because of its surface tension. Jupiter's Great Red Spot is 25,000 miles wide. The fastest moon in our solar system circles Jupiter once every seven hours - traveling at 70,400 miles per hour. The nearest galaxy to our own is Andromeda. The Sun has a diameter of 864,000 miles. If NASA sent birds into space they would soon die; they need gravity to swallow. The Sun travels at a speed of 155 miles per second, but it still takes 230 million years for it to complete a single revolution of the galaxy. The surface speed record on the moon is 10.56 miles per hour. It was set in a lunar rover. The volume of the Earth's moon is almost exactly the same as that of the Pacific Ocean. There are 7 stars in the Big Dipper. Two objects have struck the earth with enough force to destroy a whole city. Each object, one in 1908 and again in 1947, struck regions of Siberia. Not one human being was hurt either time. At the equator the Earth spins at about 1,000 miles per hour. Earth's atmosphere is, proportionally, thinner than the skin of an apple. The Earth gets heavier each day by tons, as meteoric dust settles on it. The Earth weighs around 6,588,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons. Astronomers once believed a planet named Vulcan once existed between Mercury and the sun. The Sun looks 1600 times fainter from Pluto than it does from the Earth. Ganymede is the largest moon in our solar system. It has a diameter of 5,269 kilometres and is bigger than either Mercury or Pluto. Jupiter has the shortest day of all the planets. It manages to complete one rotation in 9 hours and 55 minutes. The Earth, in its history, has been hit by at least one million meteors. Jupiter's core is in fact made of non-metal, but due to the immense pressure inside Jupiter the core has become metal. This metal is hydrogen. Saturn's rings are briefly invisible to astronomers every fourteen years. The night sky appears full of stars, but actually 5,000 stars are visible to the naked eye. Because of a large orbital eccentricity, Pluto was closer to the sun than Neptune between January 1979 and March 1999. The brightest star in the sky, Sirius, gives out twenty-six times as much light as the sun. The largest volcano known is on Mars: Olympus Mons, 370 miles wide and 79,000 feet high, is almost three times. Driving at 75 miles per hour, it would take 258 days to drive around one of Saturn's rings. higher than Mount Everest. The moon is receding from the Earth by half an inch every year. The only planet without a ring is Earth. The planet Saturn has a density lower than water. If there was a bathtub large enough to hold it, Saturn would float. Uranus' orbital axis is tilted at 90 degrees. When Voyager 2 visited Neptune it saw a small irregular white cloud that zips around Neptune every sixteen hours or so now known as The Scooter. Earth is traveling through space at 660,000 miles per hour. It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up its stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of its mouth. Then the frog uses its forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents and then swallows the stomach back down. Only one satellite has been ever been destroyed by a meteor--the European Space Agency's Olympus. The external tank on the space shuttle is not painted. When the Apollo 12 astronauts landed on the moon, the impact caused the moon's surface to vibrate for 55 minutes. During their outward flight, the astronauts noticed a cockroach in their spaceship, but when they returned, the craft was thoroughly inspected by NASA technicians and no trace of it was found. The only conclusion is that it crept out and was left behind. Just twenty seconds' worth of fuel remained when Apollo 11's lunar module landed on the moon. Mercury has been known since at least the time of the Sumerians (3rd millennium BC). Astronauts are taller in space than they are on earth since they don't have gravity draggin' them down. Among the debris the astronauts have left on the moon are a number of golf balls. The star known as LP 327-186, a so-called white dwarf, is smaller than the state of Texas yet so dense that if a cubic inch of it were brought to earth it would weigh more than 1.5 million tons. If you attempted to count to stars in a galaxy at a rate of one every second it would take around 3,000 years to count them all. A neutron star is so dense that a table spoon of matter from it would weigh over 5,000 tons. According to recent NASA research,a planet once collided with Earth .This tossed enough debris into Earth's orbit to create the moon. There are over 500,000 craters on the moon that can be seen from the planet Earth. All the planets in our solar system could be placed inside the planet Jupiter. Though they seem white through a telescope, the hottest stars are blue, and the coolest are red. The red giant star Betelgeuse has a diameter larger than that of the Earth's orbit around the sun. (and Earth is very far from the sun) The coldest place in our solar system is not Pluto, it's Triton, one of Neptune's moons. One can see the stars during the day from the bottom of a well. There are some who think Pluto would be better classified as a large asteroid or comet rather than as a planet. Mark Twain was born soon after Halley's Comet was seen, and he predicted he would die when it came again. He was right. He died in 1910. The amount of energy produced by the sun in a 2 week period equals the combined stored energy of all the coal, iron and natural gas reserves known to man. An Armageddon meteor came within 280,000 miles of the Earth on May 21, 1996. This could have been devastating to life on Earth. The first animal to go into space was a dog, sent up by the Russians. The energy released by the three Space Shuttle main engines is equivalent to the output of 23 Hoover Dams. Jupiter radiates more energy into space than it receives from the Sun. An object of space debris less than 1/8 in diameter traveling at 22,000 mph would strike an orbiting space station with the equivalent force of a bowling ball traveling 60 mph. Astronauts are taller in space than they are on earth since they don't have gravity draggin' them down. Before it blew up in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger was hit by a flake of paint, measuring 0.2 millimeters, which damaged a window during one of its missions. (the dangers of lead paint ) The largest canyon system in the Solar System is Valles Marineris on Mars. It is more than 3000 miles long and so would stretch from California to New York. In some places it reaches 3 miles in depth and 200 miles in width. If you could shrink the Milky Way down to the size of North America, our Solar System would fit inside a coffee cup. An Armageddon meteor came within 280,000 miles of the Earth on May 21, 1996. This could have been devastating to life on Earth. The turbopump on the Space Shuttle main engine is so powerful it could drain an average family-sized swimming pool in 25 seconds. A Space Shuttle and its boosters ready for launch are the same height as the Statue of Liberty but weigh almost three times as much. The Space Shuttle main engine weighs 1/7th as much as a train engine, but delivers as much horsepower as 39 train engines. 3.3357 times 10 to the power -11 is the exact time it takes a ray of light to travel one centimeter in a vacuum. Nicknamed a 'Jiffy'. The highest g-force endured was 82.6g for 0.04 seconds on a water-braked rocket sled by Eli L. Beeding, Jr., at Holloman Air Force Base on May 16, 1958. He was hospitalized for three days. Hubble Space Telescope observations ruled out the most conservative explanations for 'dark matter,' thought to make up 90% of the mass of the Universe. The Hubble Space Telescope provided the first confirmation of the existence of black holes. Some of the objects visible in Hubble Space Telescope images are nearly four billion times fainter than the limits of human vision. The Earth is the densest major body in the solar system. Astrophobia- Fear of stars and celestial space. Like Uranus and Jupiter, Neptune's rings are very dark but their composition is unknown. It takes eight minutes for light from the sun to reach the earth. When the Sun finally becomes a white dwarf, it's luminosity as viewed from Earth will appear brighter than that of 100 full moons. When the Sun goes supernova, Earth's surface and atmosphere will resemble that of Venus, while the surface of Mars will mime that of the Earth's. If the Sun were to become a neutron star, it's rotational period would be 1,000 times per second! The Sun has enough energy to burn yet another 5 billion years. Venus is the 3rd brightest object in the sky! Only the sun and moon are brighter.

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