DID YOU KNOW ?

# in 2003, China become the third nation to launch an astronaut into orbit .

# Astronauts would float when asleep if they were no strapped down in a sleeping bag .

# Weightlessness makes astronauts grow several centimeters during a long mission .

# The most powerful rocket ever was saturn 5, which sent astronauts to moon. 

#  In 1999. NASA successfully tested an ion drive engine abroad the space probe deep Space I.

# The living space on the ISS will be bigger than the passenger space on a 747 jet.

# Astronauts on space walks may be aided by a flying robot camera the size of a beach ball.

# The Andromeda Galaxy is over 2.2 million light years away , but can be seen clearly with the naked eye.

# Telescope dishes have to be made accurate to within about 10 billionths of a meter.

# The mathematics of trigonometry is thought to have been invented by Hipparchus.

# Kepler also wrote a book on how to measure the amount of wine casks. This proved to be important for the                                   mathematics of calculus .

# Newton's ideas were inspired by seeing an apple fall from a tree in the garden of his home.

# Recent theories suggest that there may be many other universe that we can never know.

# A laser beam is used to measure the distance to the moon .

# With powerful telescopes , astronomers can see galaxies two billion light years away.

# Photons of light travel in waves just 380-750 nanometers (millionths of a millimeter ) in length.

# The Hiroshima bomb released 84 trillion joules of energy . A supernova releases 1,25,0000 trillion trillion times as much.

# Quarks cane into existence when the Universe had existed for less than one second.

# On earth life exists everywhere -hot, cold , wet and dry. However , no signs of life have been found anywhere else.

# The smaller kind of star is called a neutron star. 

# Albireo is a pair of stars that appear to be partners but which are in fact some way apart. 

# The material ejected by a nova can travel through space at speeds up to 1500 km per hour.

# Many of the elements that make up the human body were forged in supernovae.

# Johan Bayer produced the first star atlas that included the entire sky.

# The temperature of the Sun's  surface is 6000 degree C . Each square centimetre burns with the brightness of 2,50,000 candles .

# The fastest -spinning objects in the universe are neutron stars - these can rotate 500 times in just one second.

# A day on moon lasts nearly one earth month.

# The oxygen in earth's atmosphere was formed entirely by plants.

# The Earth's oceans cover more than 360 million km2 of the planet.

# As the Earth rotates , it bulges in the middle like a pumpkin. 

# About every 50 million years , the earth is hit by an asteroid measuring more than 10 km. across.

#  Saturn's density is so low that it would float in water. 

#  Saturn's rings measure more that 2,70,000 km across. but are very thin at just 100 m or less . 

# Pluto was discovered on 18 February 1930 by young American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh.

# Halley's comet was seen in about 12 BC , so some say it was the Bible's Star of Bethlehem.

# The impact of a large meteorite may have chilled the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs.