New FAQ’s

by Colm Byrne on Friday, October 10th, 2014

We added some new articles to the FAQ section as there seen to be a lot of questions that we receive all the time. I don’t get to answer all question but hope these help

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What is the Biggest Star in the Universe

by Colm Byrne on Friday, January 18th, 2013

The largest star that we know of is called VY Canis Majoris it’s a long way from Earth between 3,900 and 5,000 light years.

It’s so big if it was the Sun in our solar system its surface would extend past Jupiter.

The French astronomer Jérôme Lalande is believed to be the person who discovered the star back in 1801

How about size

I think we first need to get a sense of size so we can really understand how big this star is.

Our Sun is 870,000 miles across (or 1.4 million km). We could probaly fit the Earth inside the Sun 1 million times.

The biggest star VY Canis Majoris is so big the Sun would fit inside this about 2100 times (more…)

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Space Station New Telescope

by Colm Byrne on Thursday, January 17th, 2013

Chris Hadfield is on the International Space Station (pictured above) is getting ready to install a new modified Celestron telescope. The new telescope will be used by countries that don’t have their own Earth observing satellites to monitor natural disasters.

Using the telescope they will be able to assess damage and help support people on the ground with evacuations for example.

It will also be used for environmental studies and disaster analysis when needed.

The system is called ISERV (International Space Station SERVIR Environmental Research and Visualization System) and will be supporting NASA’s SERVIR project.

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NASA “Inflatable” Space Station Module

by Colm Byrne on Thursday, January 17th, 2013

NASA is working with a company called Bigelow Aerospace on an inflatable space station. Bigelow Aerospace’s mission is “to provide affordable options for spaceflight to national space agencies and corporate clients”

The plan is to use these modules on the International space station (ISS).

In 2006 and 2007 Bigelow launched Genesis I and Genesis II in to space using cutting-edge technology to allow people thrive in space safely and making it very affordable.

At the moment there is no set date as to when NASA will use this technology. But, they are expected to announce something with the next few weeks. It’s a very interesting this whole concept of inflatable ISS modules.

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Learn about the Moon – Video

by Colm Byrne on Monday, January 14th, 2013

This is a very informative video about our moon it’s about 5:30 minutes long and explains so much about the nearest satellite to the planet Earth.

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How big is Earth

by Colm Byrne on Monday, January 14th, 2013

This is a really good Question : How big is the planet Earth

As you’ll know already Earth is the third planet form the Sun (Mercury, Venus, Earth) in our solar system.

It’s what we call a terrestrial planet and is in the inner solar system.

Our Planets Radius and Diameter

If we where to start at the equator and go around, the Earth’s equatorial diameter is 7,926 miles or 12,756 kilometers.

(in 1980 a B-52 plane took 47 hours to fly around the planet, it was refueled in flight. The average speed of a plane is about 550 mph)

From the north pole to the south pole, the diameter is 7,900 miles or 12,720 km

What is the surface area of our World?

510,072,000 square kilometers (total) or 200,000,000 million (two hundred million) square miles.

Did you know that 29.2% is covered by land and 70.8% is covered by water or 149,000,000 square kilometers is land

How heavy is the Earth

So this is not that easy to answer simply because we don’t have a giant weighing scales, So, scientists initially tried to estimate the weight of a very large/biggest mountain and using various calculations and mathematics came up with around 6 quadrillion kilograms. This is huge and one of the amazing answers that science can come up with.

Finally

The above values are approximations simply because the earth is made up of mountains, lakes, rivers, lumps, bumps, valleys and much more that can make is hard to measure. All of theses can affect the size of the Earth simply because the geography is always changing.

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The Moon at Sunrise

by Colm Byrne on Thursday, January 10th, 2013

An amazing image of the Moon taken from the International Space Station tonight by Chris Hadfield.

Chris is currently on the ISS and has been tweeting and taken pictures everyday. He’s been sharing them with his follows over at @Cmdr_Hadfield so pop over to Twitter and see what other super images he had been sharing with us.

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Asteroid Orbits

by Colm Byrne on Monday, January 7th, 2013

Asteroids have different names, a group of asteroids that have similar orbits are also give names like the Trojans, the Apollos, the Atens, the Kuiper, and the Amors.

The main asteroid belt is between Mars and Jupiter, if something bumped into one of these asteroids it could fall towards the Sun, Mars or even Jupiter. Some people believe the moons Phobos and Diemos might be even captured asteroids that got knocked off  the main asteroid belt.

Because Jupiter is so big sometime the gravity of Jupiter can cause the asteroids to impact each other.

The Trojans – these are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet, circling around the sun in front or behind the planet.

The Apollos, Atens, and Amors are better known as near Earth asteroids.There were approximately 8000 known near Earth asteroids. Most of the time they are a very small threat to Earth and are observed by astronomers. The image below shows their orbit

The Kuiper belt – are small bodies orbiting the sun beyond Neptune. it’s very similar to the main asteroid belt. They are made up of icy objects and some people believe this to be the home of comets that orbit our sun.

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You Snore Less in Space

by Colm Byrne on Sunday, January 6th, 2013

OK so it’s not something I was really thinking about until I see a tweet from Chris Hadfield @Cmdr_Hadfield who is currently on the International Space Station.

It’s belived that many people spend up to seventeen percent of their sleeping time snoring, and weightlessness reduced that to one percent.

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Saturn’s Rings and Clouds from NASA

by Colm Byrne on Friday, January 4th, 2013

NASA released this amazing photo of the planet Saturn in December which shows the rings, moons and of course the turbulent atmosphere on the planet.

The photo was taken by the Cassini spacecraft which was launched in 1997 and traveled almost 3.8 billion miles so far.

The stunning new views of Saturn and its moons are really nice for us on Earth to look at. So far we know that Saturn has 62 moons, 53 of them have names and the rest are really small about 50 kilometers across.

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