147 Fun Facts About Space

The zone around a star where a planet could hold liquid water is nicknamed after which fairy-tale character?

Goldilocks lends the zone its nickname because conditions there are 'just right', and astronomers use it to pick out exoplanets that might host life.

How long does sunlight take to travel from the Sun to Earth?

About 8 minutes for the trip here, yet that energy first spent many thousands of years working its way out from the Sun's core.

Which mission carried the first astronauts around the Moon, photographing Earthrise on Christmas Eve 1968?

Apollo 8 was meant to test the lunar module in Earth orbit, but the module ran late, so NASA sent the crew around the Moon instead.

Who was the first human to walk on the Moon?

Neil Armstrong said he meant 'one small step for a man', but analysts have disagreed over whether he spoke the 'a' and it was lost in transmission.

Which NASA space telescope was launched in 1990?

Hubble Space Telescope's main mirror had a tiny flaw, so its first images were fuzzy until astronauts fitted corrective optics in 1993.

What is a black hole?

A region from which nothing can escape, not even light: that is a black hole, and anything falling in is stretched thin, which scientists call spaghettification.

Which planet was the first located through mathematical prediction rather than regular observation of the sky?

Neptune turned up in 1846 about a degree from where Le Verrier had calculated it should be, working only from odd tugs on another planet's orbit.

What is the International Space Station (ISS)?

An orbiting research laboratory, the ISS circles Earth about every 90 minutes, so its crew sees about 16 sunrises and sunsets a day.

What is the closest star to Earth after the Sun?

Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf too faint to see with the naked eye, despite being the nearest star to us after the Sun.

What galaxy do we live in?

The Milky Way looks like a hazy band across our sky because we sit inside its flat disc of stars and see it edge-on.

Which NASA rover landed on Mars in February 2021?

Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater because rivers once filled it with a lake, and the delta they left may preserve traces of ancient microbial life.

What is the Great Red Spot?

A giant storm, the Great Red Spot was about three Earths wide in the late 1800s, but by 2014 telescopes found it at the smallest size ever measured.

What does NASA stand for?

National Aeronautics and Space Administration was built on NACA, America's aircraft research agency, when it opened in 1958, so it researches planes as well as spacecraft.

Mark Twain was born during one visit of which comet and died just after its next return?

Halley's Comet was back in 1910, and Twain, who had predicted he would 'go out with it', died the day after it passed closest to the Sun.

What was the first animal sent into orbit around Earth?

Laika the dog, a stray picked up off the street, reached orbit in November 1957, but no way to bring her home had been built, and she died within hours.

What is the Kuiper Belt?

A region of icy bodies beyond Neptune's orbit, the Kuiper Belt turned out to hold other Pluto-like worlds, and finding them led to Pluto being reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006.

Who founded SpaceX?

Elon Musk first tried to buy a rocket to send a small greenhouse to Mars, but the price was too high, so he started his own rocket company instead.

Which boundary is most widely used to mark where Earth's atmosphere ends and space begins?

The Kármán Line sits 100 km up, yet NASA and the US military count space as starting lower, at about 80 km, so the edge of space depends on who you ask.

Which organisation voted in 2006 to reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet?

The International Astronomical Union decided a planet must clear its orbit of other objects, which Pluto fails because other bodies cross its path.

What was the first artificial satellite launched into Earth's orbit?

Sputnik 1 carried little more than a beeping radio, yet amateurs worldwide could hear it pass overhead, and the shock pushed the United States into the Space Race.

What do astronomers call the explosion of a massive star at the end of its life?

A supernova seen in 1054 shone in the daytime sky for nearly a month, and the glowing cloud it left behind is the Crab Nebula.

Which crewed lunar mission suffered an oxygen tank explosion en route to the Moon?

Apollo 13's oxygen tank exploded two days after launch, so the crew abandoned the landing and squeezed into the two-person lunar module as a lifeboat to get home.

Roughly how old is the universe?

About 14 billion years, and in its first fraction of a second, space itself expanded faster than the speed of light, a burst called cosmic inflation.

What type of star is our Sun?

Yellow dwarf is the Sun's nickname, but its light is actually white; it looks yellow from the ground because Earth's atmosphere scatters some blue light away.

Which planet rotates on its side with an axial tilt of about 98 degrees?

Uranus was probably knocked sideways by a collision with an Earth-sized object long ago, which gives it the most extreme seasons of any planet.

What is the brightest star in the night sky as seen from Earth?

Sirius, the Dog Star, gave summer's 'dog days' their name, because the ancient Greeks linked its early-morning rising with the hottest weather.

What is the name of the first space shuttle to fly in space?

Columbia broke apart on re-entry in 2003 because a chunk of foam from its fuel tank had struck its left wing during launch.

What is the invisible substance thought to make up about 85% of the universe's mass?

Dark matter neither emits nor absorbs light and is inferred only from its gravity, such as the way galaxies spin faster than their visible mass allows.

Which Galilean moon's smooth, crack-streaked ice shell is thought to cover a saltwater ocean?

Europa is thought to hide an ocean under its ice, and NASA launched Europa Clipper in October 2024 to learn whether that ocean could support life.

What is a light-year a measure of?

Distance, not time: astronomers prefer the parsec, partly because it comes straight from a star's measured parallax.

Which moon is the only known world besides Earth with stable lakes and seas on its surface?

Titan's lakes and seas are made of liquid hydrocarbons, probably methane and ethane rather than water, fed by rain from its thick nitrogen atmosphere.

What is the Oort Cloud?

A distant shell of icy bodies around the Sun, the Oort Cloud has never been directly seen; astronomers infer it from long-period comets that arrive from every direction.

Who was the first woman in space?

Valentina Tereshkova was a textile factory worker whose hobby of skydiving helped get her picked for the Soviet space programme.

What causes a solar eclipse?

The Moon passes between the Sun and Earth, but when it is near its farthest from Earth it looks too small to cover the Sun, leaving a bright ring.

Which rocket lands its first stage after launch so it can be flown again?

Falcon 9 is SpaceX's partially reusable two-stage booster; its first stage flies back to a landing, which is what has driven launch costs down.

What mainly makes Venus the hottest planet in our solar system?

A thick carbon dioxide atmosphere traps the Sun's heat on Venus in a runaway greenhouse effect, leaving its surface hot enough to melt lead.

What are the Van Allen radiation belts?

Charged particles trapped by Earth's magnetism overwhelmed Explorer 1's radiation counter so badly that it read zero, the puzzle that revealed the Van Allen belts.

Which spacecraft was the first to fly by Pluto?

New Horizons left Earth in January 2006 bound for what was then the ninth planet, but by its July 2015 flyby Pluto had been reclassified as a dwarf planet.

What is the largest moon in our solar system?

Ganymede is the only moon known to generate its own magnetic field, which lights up auroras that circle its poles.

What message for extraterrestrials did two NASA probes launched in 1977 carry?

A golden record of Earth's sounds, chosen by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan, comes with a needle and symbolic instructions showing any finder how to play it.

What is the cosmic microwave background (CMB)?

The cosmic microwave background is faint electromagnetic radiation filling all of space, representing the afterglow of the Big Bang from approximately 380,000 years after the universe began.

Who was the first human to travel into space?

Yuri Gagarin ejected from Vostok 1 about 7 km above the ground and came down under his own parachute, landing apart from his capsule.

Which rover, the first to drive on Mars, landed with Mars Pathfinder?

Sojourner was built for about a week of driving on Mars but kept working for nearly three months after landing on July 4, 1997.

Roughly how far away is the Moon from Earth?

About 240,000 miles, and the gap is growing, because the Moon drifts a little farther from Earth every year.

What is the James Webb Space Telescope primarily designed to observe?

Infrared light from early galaxies started out as visible or ultraviolet light, but the expanding universe stretched it into infrared by the time it reaches us.

What is the asteroid belt?

A region of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, the belt holds so little material that all its asteroids together have less mass than our Moon.

Who was the first American to orbit Earth?

John Glenn took manual control of Friendship 7 when its automatic system failed, and controllers kept the retrorocket pack strapped on in case the heat shield was loose.

What object is left behind when a supernova's collapsing core is not heavy enough to become a black hole?

A neutron star packs roughly 1.4 times the Sun's mass into a sphere only about 12 miles across; a teaspoon of it would outweigh hundreds of Great Pyramids.

What is the Chandrasekhar limit?

The maximum mass of a stable white dwarf was worked out by a young Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, but Arthur Eddington publicly dismissed the idea as absurd in 1935.

Which space mission first landed humans on the Moon?

Apollo 11's computer was steering Eagle toward a field of boulders, so the commander took over by hand and landed with fuel running low.

What is the smallest planet in the solar system?

Mercury's interior cooled and contracted over billions of years, wrinkling its surface into cliffs that stretch for hundreds of miles.

Which country operates the Tiangong space station?

China built Tiangong on its own after a 2011 US law, the Wolf Amendment, kept it out of the International Space Station programme.

Who was the second person to walk on the Moon?

Buzz Aldrin followed his commander onto the lunar surface and set up the mission's package of science experiments.

Which element makes up most of the Sun?

Hydrogen is fused into helium in the Sun's core, and that reaction powers all of the Sun's heat and light.

What is the nearest major galaxy to our own?

Andromeda can be seen with the naked eye on dark nights, yet the light reaching you left it about 2.5 million years ago.

Who became the first American woman in space, in 1983?

Sally Ride worked the shuttle's robot arm on her 1983 flight, holding a small experiment satellite, SPAS-01, while the orbiter fired its thrusters.

Which Martian volcano stands more than twice as tall as Mount Everest?

Olympus Mons grew so huge because Mars's crust doesn't drift over hot spots the way Earth's does, so lava kept piling up in one place.

The red supergiant Betelgeuse is in which constellation?

Betelgeuse, in Orion, faded sharply in 2019-20, and astronomers found that a cloud of dust the star had cast off was blocking its light.

What gives the dust covering Mars its reddish colour?

Iron oxide gives the Martian dust its rusty colour, yet that same fine dust lets blue light through, so sunsets on Mars glow blue.

Which country made the first soft landing near the Moon's south pole in August 2023?

India's Chandrayaan-3 lander Vikram touched down at about 69 degrees south on August 23, 2023, four years after Chandrayaan-2's lander crashed attempting the same feat.

The Baikonur Cosmodrome, built for the Soviet rocket programme, is now in which country?

Kazakhstan's Baikonur began as a secret Soviet missile test range, yet an American U-2 spy plane found and photographed its launch pad in 1957.

Ingenuity, which made the first powered, controlled flight on another planet, was what kind of vehicle?

A helicopter built for just five test flights in Mars's thin air, Ingenuity flew 72 times before a damaged rotor grounded it in January 2024.

In which country did the 1908 Tunguska airburst happen?

Russia: a small asteroid or comet is believed to have blown up in mid-air over Siberia, which is why no impact crater was ever found.

Ham, launched on a suborbital flight in January 1961, was what kind of animal?

Ham the chimpanzee was named for Holloman Aero Med, the lab that trained him, and his flight results led directly to America's first crewed spaceflight months later.

What was the name of the first US space station, launched in 1973?

Skylab lost its micrometeoroid shield, which doubled as a sunshade, during launch, so its first crew had to cut free a jammed solar array to restore power.

Which Jovian moon, with 400+ volcanoes, is the most geologically active body known?

Io is caught in a tug-of-war between Jupiter's gravity and the pulls of two neighbouring moons, and that constant squeezing heats its interior.

Which asteroid-belt body, discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi on 1 January 1801, was the first asteroid found?

Ceres was called an asteroid for many years, but in 2006 it was reclassified as a dwarf planet, the only one in the inner solar system.

Roughly how long is a day on Jupiter?

About 10 hours: Jupiter spins faster than any other planet, and that spin drives the jet streams that stripe its clouds into belts and zones.

Which astronaut hit two golf balls on the Moon during Apollo 14?

Alan Shepard carried a modified six-iron in his spacesuit pocket, clipped its head onto a sample-collecting handle and swung one-handed in his stiff suit.

The 1986 Challenger disaster was traced to the failure of which component?

O-ring seals: record cold on launch morning stiffened the rubber O-rings in the right solid rocket booster's aft joint, letting hot gas burn through to the external fuel tank.

Who discovered Pluto in 1930?

Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, but its name came from Venetia Burney, an 11-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England.

The giant Arecibo radio telescope, which collapsed in 2020, was located where?

Puerto Rico's Arecibo telescope beamed a coded radio message about humanity toward a star cluster 25,000 light-years away in 1974.

Polaris, the North Star, is the brightest star in which constellation?

Ursa Minor's brightest star is Polaris, which sits less than one degree from the north celestial pole, so it barely moves while the whole northern sky turns around it.

Which supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy was imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2022?

Sagittarius A* was weighed by tracking the stars that race around it, whose orbits reveal about four million Suns' worth of mass.

What shape is the persistent cloud pattern around Saturn's north pole?

The hexagon turned from bluish to golden between 2012 and 2016, likely because summer sunlight built up haze over Saturn's north pole.

Who performed the first spacewalk, in March 1965?

Alexei Leonov's spacesuit swelled in the vacuum, and he struggled to squeeze back through the inflatable airlock.

Which spacecraft became the first to enter interstellar space, in 2012?

Voyager 1 launched about two weeks after its twin, Voyager 2, but took a faster route, overtook it, and in August 2012 crossed the heliopause, the edge of the Sun's bubble.

Who became the first African-American woman in space, aboard Endeavour in 1992?

Mae Jemison, a doctor, ran experiments aboard Endeavour on space motion sickness, bone loss and whether frog eggs fertilised in orbit would develop normally.

Which comet broke apart and slammed into Jupiter in July 1994?

Shoemaker–Levy 9 broke into a string of fragments that hit Jupiter over several days in July 1994, and the Galileo spacecraft, still on its way there, watched them strike.

Cassini found water plumes venting from the south pole of which moon?

Enceladus's plumes spray its hidden ocean into space, and only some of that spray escapes to feed Saturn's vast E ring.

Which ESA lander bounced twice before making the first soft landing on a comet, in 2014?

Philae's harpoons failed to fire, so it bounced off the comet and ended up wedged in a dark crack, where it was not photographed until September 2016.

NASA's OSIRIS-REx returned a sample from which asteroid in 2023?

The capsule carrying Bennu's rubble reached Earth on 24 September 2023, and the spacecraft flew on, renamed OSIRIS-APEX, to study the asteroid Apophis.

The first-ever black hole image (2019) showed the one at the centre of which galaxy?

Messier 87's black hole was imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope, which linked radio dishes around the globe into one virtual telescope the size of Earth.

Which dwarf planet, discovered in 2005, is named after a goddess of strife and discord?

Eris was already in telescope images taken in October 2003, but nobody spotted it until those images were re-analysed in January 2005.

What was 'Oumuamua, spotted by a Hawaiian telescope in October 2017?

The first confirmed interstellar object, 'Oumuamua was briefly classed as an asteroid until it was seen speeding up slightly, a sign it behaves more like a comet.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered what type of object in 1967?

Jocelyn Bell Burnell spotted the first pulsar in 1967, but the 1974 Nobel Prize for discovering pulsars went to Antony Hewish and not to her.

Who launched the world's first liquid-fuelled rocket, in 1926?

Robert Goddard's historic rocket flew for only about 2.5 seconds, climbed 12.5 metres and came down in a cabbage patch 56 metres away.

Which is the only large moon in the solar system that travels around a planet backwards?

Triton's backwards orbit is why scientists think it was once a separate dwarf planet, captured by its planet's gravity rather than formed in place.

Which spacecraft became the fastest human-made object, topping 690,000 km/h near the Sun in 2024?

Parker Solar Probe used repeated flybys of a neighbouring planet to shrink its orbit, and in December 2024 it passed just 3.8 million miles above the Sun's surface.

What was the first modular space station, assembled in orbit from 1986?

Mir outlived the Soviet Union that launched it and stayed in service for 15 years, until March 2001.

Which ESA probe rode to Saturn aboard NASA's Cassini and in 2005 landed on one of Saturn's moons?

Huygens picked up radio signals during its descent that strongly suggested an ocean hidden tens of kilometres beneath the moon's icy ground.

Mars's two moons, Phobos and Deimos, are named after the sons of which Greek god?

Ares had sons named Phobos and Deimos, and their names went to the moons Asaph Hall nearly gave up searching for until his wife, Angeline Stickney, urged him on.

Which NASA probe was the first to orbit two different worlds in the asteroid belt?

Dawn relied on ion engines, which let it enter and then leave orbit around the giant asteroid Vesta before flying on to orbit a second world.

Which Soviet probe made the first successful soft landing on another planet, in 1970?

Venera 7 came after earlier Soviet probes crashed without sending back surface data, and it became the first to land on another planet and radio home from its surface.

Which probe in 1959 became the first human-made object to hit the Moon?

Luna 2 succeeded where Luna 1 had failed, since Luna 1 was meant to hit the Moon but missed it by about 6,000 km and flew past.

Which US-funded, Moscow-built module became the first piece of the International Space Station in 1998?

Zarya circled Earth alone for about two weeks until the shuttle Endeavour arrived in December 1998 and joined the Unity module to it.

Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the solar system, is named after what?

The Mariner 9 orbiter reached Mars during a planet-wide dust storm and had to wait until early 1972 for the dust to clear before mapping the canyon.

On Mars, where the daytime sky is butterscotch, what colour is the sky around the setting Sun?

Blue rings the setting Sun on Mars because airborne dust, not gas, does most of the scattering there. It is the opposite of Earth, where the day is blue and the dusk is red.

Pluto got its name from Venetia Burney of Oxford, who was what when she suggested it?

An 11-year-old schoolgirl, Venetia picked the Roman god of the underworld for the newly found world. Her librarian grandfather passed the idea to an astronomer, who cabled it to Lowell Observatory.

NASA's first shuttle orbiter was renamed after a letter-writing campaign by fans of which television series?

Star Trek fans wrote to President Gerald Ford, so the craft planned as Constitution rolled out in 1976 as Enterprise. Built without engines or a heat shield, it never flew in space.

Which element was first detected in the Sun's light in 1868, 27 years before anyone isolated it on Earth?

Helium takes its name from helios, the Greek word for the Sun, where its telltale line of light first showed up. Nobody isolated it on Earth until 1895, from a uranium ore.

On Apollo 15, David Scott dropped a hammer and which other object to show they fall equally fast on the Moon?

A feather from a bird of prey hit the dust at the same instant as the hammer, live on television. With no air to slow it, the drop proved Galileo right about falling objects.

What were the first animals ever sent into space, launched by the US on a captured V-2 rocket in 1947?

Fruit flies were chosen to test how radiation at high altitude affects living things. They climbed to 109 km and parachuted back alive.

The asteroid blamed for wiping out the dinosaurs left the buried Chicxulub crater in which present-day country?

Mexico hides the scar under its Yucatán Peninsula: a crater about 200 km wide, found by geophysicists who were hunting for oil in the 1970s. The rock that made it was roughly ten kilometres across.

With gravity on the ISS still 90 percent of ground level, astronauts float because the station is constantly doing what?

Falling around Earth is all an orbit is: the station drops toward the ground but flies sideways fast enough to keep missing it. Everything aboard falls together, so nothing feels its weight.

The International Space Station laps Earth so quickly that its crew sees about how many sunrises every 24 hours?

16 sunrises and 16 sunsets slide past the windows each day, because one lap of the planet takes only about an hour and a half. The station covers more than 27,000 km every hour.

NASA's programme to return astronauts to the Moon is named after which Greek goddess, the twin sister of Apollo?

Artemis was picked in 2019 because the first Moon landings had carried her brother's name. NASA said the new name also stood for landing the first woman there.

Which feature of Earth causes its seasons and explains why summer in Australia falls in December?

Its tilted axis leans each half of the planet toward the Sun for part of the year. Nearness is not the cause: Earth is actually closest to the Sun in early January.

Which glowing sky display over the Arctic is set off when gusts of the solar wind reach Earth?

The northern lights, or aurora borealis, have a twin over Antarctica called the aurora australis. Both appear when particles rain into the upper atmosphere and make its gases glow.

From which US state did every crewed Apollo mission and every Space Shuttle flight lift off?

Florida launches head east over the Atlantic, so spent stages fall into the sea. The site is also nearer the equator than most of the country, which lets rockets borrow extra speed from Earth's spin.

Space travellers launched by the Soviet Union, starting with the first human in orbit, are known by what title?

Cosmonauts take their title from kosmos, the Russian word for space, joined to the Greek for sailor. 'Astronaut' was built the same way and means star sailor.

Which process powers the Sun by forcing atomic nuclei together at about 15 million degrees in its core?

Nuclear fusion turns about four billion kilograms of the Sun's matter into energy every second. Even at that rate, the Sun is only about halfway through this stage of its life.

What is the correct name for a space rock that survives its fiery plunge and lands on Earth's surface?

Meteorite is the name only for the piece that reaches the ground. The same rock is a meteoroid while it drifts in space and a meteor during the streak of light it makes on the way down.

Saturn's bright rings, first glimpsed through a telescope in 1610, are made almost entirely of what?

Water ice makes up about 99.9 percent of the rings, in pieces ranging from dust specks to chunks metres across. In places the whole sheet is as little as 10 metres thick.

During a total lunar eclipse, sunlight bent through Earth's atmosphere usually turns the Moon which colour?

Coppery red is the glow of every sunrise and sunset on Earth at once, bent into the planet's shadow. Without that ring of air, the eclipsed Moon would go completely dark.

In about five billion years the Sun will run short of fuel and swell into which kind of star?

Red giant is the Sun's next stage: its core will shrink and heat up while its outer layers balloon outward. After that it will shed those layers and fade as a small, dense ember.

What name do astronomers give a planet that circles a star other than the Sun, first confirmed in the 1990s?

Exoplanet hunting won a share of a Nobel Prize in 2019 for the discovery of 51 Pegasi b, a giant world that circles a Sun-like star in about four days.

Which constellation, the smallest in the sky, appears on the national flags of Australia and New Zealand?

Southern Cross stars also appear on the flags of Brazil, Papua New Guinea and Samoa. Astronomers call the constellation Crux, and its four main stars make it one of the easiest to pick out.

Christa McAuliffe, a crew member on Challenger's final flight in 1986, had been chosen to be the first what in space?

Teacher Christa McAuliffe was picked from more than 11,000 applicants and planned to give two lessons from orbit. Another teacher, Barbara Morgan, trained alongside her as backup.

Laser beams bounced off reflectors left by Apollo crews show the Moon is doing what by 3.8 cm a year?

Moving away from Earth is a side effect of the tides: tidal friction drains energy from the rotating pair and lets the Moon spiral slowly outward.

Whichever way a comet is travelling, the solar wind makes its tail always point in which direction?

Away from the Sun is where sunlight and the solar wind push the gas and dust a comet sheds. A comet heading back out to deep space therefore travels tail-first.

The Pleiades star cluster gives both its Japanese name and its six-star logo to which car maker?

Subaru is the Japanese name for the cluster, which English speakers call the Seven Sisters. The carmaker chose it to mark its own origin as five companies joined into one.

Which David Bowie song did Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield record as a music video aboard the ISS in 2013?

Space Oddity became the first music video filmed in space when Hadfield recorded it as a farewell, just after handing over command of the station.

What unusual dummy payload did a private heavy-lift rocket carry on its 2018 maiden flight toward the orbit of Mars?

A red sports car with a spacesuited mannequin in the driver's seat rode the rocket's first test flight. A sign on its dashboard read 'DON'T PANIC!', a nod to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Which astronomer co-wrote and narrated the 1980 television series Cosmos, seen by at least 500 million people?

Carl Sagan's 13-part series won two Emmy Awards and a Peabody. In it he described humans as 'a way for the cosmos to know itself'.

Which physicist, author of A Brief History of Time, predicted that black holes slowly give off radiation?

Stephen Hawking showed that black holes are not completely black after all. His book explaining the universe to general readers stayed on the Sunday Times bestseller list for a record 237 weeks.

Whose book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, published in 1543, put the Sun at the centre instead of Earth?

Nicolaus Copernicus saw the book printed only at the very end of his life: legend has it that the final pages reached him on the day he died. The upheaval it began still carries his name.

Which NASA mathematician, portrayed in the film Hidden Figures, checked an early computer's orbit sums by hand?

Katherine Johnson was asked for by name: an astronaut refused to fly until she had verified the electronic computer's numbers for his trip around the planet.

"Houston, Tranquility Base here" was followed by news that which spacecraft "has landed" on the Moon?

The Eagle touched down in July 1969 after its guidance computer distracted the crew with a string of program alarms. It carried the first people ever to walk on the Moon.

Which astronaut stayed alone in lunar orbit in July 1969 while two crewmates made the first Moon landing?

Michael Collins was out of radio contact for 48 minutes of every lap, behind the Moon. He said he felt not fear or loneliness but 'awareness, anticipation, satisfaction, confidence, almost exultation'.

American businessman Dennis Tito paid a reported $20 million in 2001 to become the first what?

Space tourist Dennis Tito funded his own trip and spent nearly eight days in orbit as a crew member of a visiting mission to the International Space Station.

The 18 mirror segments of the James Webb Space Telescope are coated with a very thin layer of which metal?

Gold is laid over mirrors made of beryllium, then sealed under a thin layer of glass for durability. Together the 18 pieces form a single mirror 6.5 metres across.

NASA's probe that entered orbit around Jupiter in 2016 is named after which Roman goddess, Jupiter's wife?

Juno could peer through the veil of clouds her husband drew around himself to hide his mischief, which is the probe's job too. It carries three Lego figures, one of them the goddess herself.

Which moon of Pluto is so big, half the dwarf planet's width, that the two circle a point between them?

Charon was picked by its discoverer as a nod to his wife, Charlene, and happened to match the ferryman of the dead in Greek myth. The pair always keep the same faces turned toward each other.

NASA's DART spacecraft deliberately crashed into the small space rock Dimorphos in 2022 to test which idea?

Deflecting an asteroid worked better than hoped: the crash shortened Dimorphos's lap around its partner rock by 32 minutes, when 73 seconds would have counted as success.

Which meteor shower, seen every July and August, comes from the dusty trail of Comet Swift–Tuttle?

Perseids get their name because they seem to streak out of the constellation Perseus. Each one is a grain shed by the comet, burning up as Earth crosses its trail.

Physicists describe the stretching of anything that falls into a black hole with a word borrowed from which food?

Spaghetti gives us 'spaghettification': gravity pulls far harder on the near end of a falling object than on the far end, drawing it out long and thin.

Which pair of animals flew around the Moon on the Soviet Zond 5 in 1968 instead of a human crew?

Tortoises took the trip because Soviet planners feared the bad press of a failed crewed flight. They came back thinner from hunger but otherwise little affected by space travel.

Which German-born engineer helped design the wartime V-2 and later led work on NASA's Apollo Moon rocket?

Wernher von Braun was moved to the United States in secret after the war, along with about 1,600 other German scientists and engineers, in a programme called Operation Paperclip.

Astronaut Stuart Roosa carried about 500 of what around the Moon in 1971, later given away across America?

Tree seeds from five species, including redwood and sycamore, rode in a small canister at the request of the US Forest Service. The saplings raised from them are known as Moon trees.

The leading theory says the Moon formed from debris after early Earth was struck by a Mars-sized body called what?

Theia takes its name from the mother of the Moon goddess in Greek myth. Two dense blobs deep inside Earth are suspected to be sunken remnants of the lost world.

Which moon of Saturn has a giant crater that makes it resemble the Death Star from Star Wars?

Mimas wears a crater 139 km wide, about a third of its own width. The likeness is a coincidence: the film was made nearly three years before anyone could see the crater.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched in 2021 from a spaceport near the equator in which part of South America?

French Guiana offers open sea to the east and a spot only about 500 km from the equator, where Earth's spin gives rockets a strong free push. It is an overseas region of France.

In 1977 astronomer Jerry Ehman circled a 72-second radio burst on a printout and wrote which word beside it?

Wow! is still the signal's name. Ohio's Big Ear telescope caught it during a search for alien broadcasts, and despite many follow-up searches it has never recurred.

Which brilliant objects, first picked up as mystery radio sources in the 1950s, are the cores of distant galaxies?

Quasars looked like faint stars in photographs, hence a name squeezed from 'quasi-stellar radio source'. Each one marks a galaxy core with a giant black hole inside.

Which astronomer, whose star measurements Johannes Kepler later used, wore a false nose after a sword duel?

Tycho Brahe lost the bridge of his nose at 20, duelling a cousin, and wore a prosthetic for the rest of his life. The two men later made up.

Which comet, discovered in July 1995, went on to stay visible to the naked eye for a record 18 months?

Hale–Bopp carries the names of Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp, who found it separately before it brightened. Its huge nucleus kept it in view for a record length of time.