On July 20, 1969, at 20:17 UTC, two American astronauts, Apollo 11 mission commander Neil Armstrong and pilot Buzz Aldrin landed the lunar module Eagle on the Moon. It was the first time humans set foot on another planetary body than Earth, making the moon landing probably the most monumental event in history.
Vox.com published a beautiful video highlighting the key moments of the Apollo 11 mission.
Continue reading Watch: Apollo 11’s journey to the moon, annotatedMore than a year ago, on Monday, August 21, around 2 million to 7.4 million Americans traveled to see the first total solar eclipse in 99 years to go coast to coast in the United States. Photographer Jon Carmichael chose another way. He got aboard a Southwest Airlines aircraft and captured the Great American Total Solar Eclipse from an unusual vantage point at 39,000 feet (11,890 meters). And the result is probably the most beautiful Solar Eclipse photo ever.
Continue reading This is probably the most beautiful Solar Eclipse photo everAmateur astronomers in the Netherlands took an amazing Moon-Earth photo using a Chinese satellite. On May 20, 2018, China launched Queqiao lunar communications relay satellite, a key component of the upcoming
On August 6, 2012, at 05:17 UTC, NASA has successfully landed a Mini-Cooper-sized rover, Curiosity, on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars. The 900-kg rover (899 kg, to be exact, which is 1,982 lbs) is equipped with six 50 cm (20 in) diameter wheels in a rocker-bogie suspension. Notes 1 For the first time in the history of the space exploration, the suspension system also served as landing gear for the vehicle, unlike its smaller predecessors.
Curiosity “soft-landed” (wheels down) on the surface of Mars. But, even it’s called “soft-landing”, the touchdown speed was 0.6739m/s vertical and 0.044m/s horizontal, which could damage the wheels. Plus, while the rover is moving, the wheels should withstand the substantial damage through the rough Martian surface. That’s why the wheels of the Curiosity rover have been one of the biggest technical difficulties encountered on the mission. Notes 2
Continue reading How NASA Reinvented The WheelDespite we always see the same side of the Moon, it still looks a little different every night. Sometimes we see only a thin crescent, sometimes a half-moon, sometimes a full moon, and other times in-between. Sometimes even the Moon seems to disappear entirely. These “shapes” called lunar phases or phases of the Moon. A lunar phase is the shape of the directly sunlit portion of the Moon as viewed from Earth.
Continue reading What causes the phases of the moon?NASA has published an amazing video titled “Moonlight (Clair de Lune)”, which attempts to capture the mood of the French composer Claude Debussy’s (22 August 1862 – 25 March 1918) best-known composition, Clair de Lune (moonlight in French).
Continue reading Lunar Landmarks meets Debussy’s “Moonlight” in this Amazing NASA VideoThe Moon is completely uninhabitable and lifeless today – a dusty, dry rock. It has no atmosphere, there is no liquid water on the surface, and, maybe the most important, it has no magnetosphere to protect its surface from solar wind and cosmic radiation. But, according to a new study published in Astrobiology, it may have looked quite different around four billion years ago: its surface was not as dry as it is today, and conditions to support simple life on the Moon existed twice during the early years.
Continue reading Life on the Moon? New study suggests there was a habitability window 4 billion years agoNASA has just published Two Years’ Worth of Apollo 11 Mission Audio (the first manned moon landing mission) on their website “Explore Apollo“. That’s more than 19,000 hours of audio.
Continue reading NASA Has Released Apollo 11 Mission Audio
The mighty Saturn V, the rocket that took humans to the moon, remains the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful rocket ever brought to operational status (as of 2018). It was used by NASA between 1967 and 1973. It was powered by five Rocketdyne F-1 engines. With a thrust of 1,746,000 lbf (7,770 kN) in vacuum (1,522,000 lbf / 6,770 kN at sea level), the F-1 remains the most powerful single combustion chamber liquid-propellant rocket engine ever developed.
Continue reading Why can’t we Remake the Rocketdyne F-1 Engine, which took humans to the Moon?
To able to reach the space, we need rockets. Rocket engines work by action and reaction (“To every action, there is always opposed an equal reaction”Notes 1) and push rockets forward simply by expelling their exhaust in the opposite direction at high speed and can therefore work in the vacuum of space. Space rockets are usually enormous in size, because the bigger the rocket is, the more thrust can produce its engine and can carry more weight into the orbit. Here are the 10 tallest rockets ever launched in the history of space exploration.
Continue reading Watch: Top 10 Tallest Rockets Ever Launched
