Astronaut picture

Hi friends 🖖;

Hope you’re all right and that the confinment situation is under control. In this editorial, I chosed to put together some not-so-common amazing facts about space and satellites. Please enjoy, and as always, all sorts of feedbacks and comments are very welcome:

  • Here’s a small read and an artist’s impression about the exoplanet J1407b and its amazing MASSIVE ring system.

  • How loud would the sun be if it wasn’t in the vacuum of space? The sun resonated at a frequency around 0.0033Hz. For the reference, the audible frequencies by the human ears are in the range [20Hz, 20kHz]. On the earth surface, the sun sound would have 125 decibels (regarding sound power in air of 1pW). Here is an audible sample provided by ESA and NASA.

  • Millions of years before you were born, a photon was emitted. Tonight, as you look up to relieve your neck and staring outside your window, you see a star…it is that same photon that reached your retina.

  • The Andromeda Galaxy is one of the few galaxies observable with the naked eye. It is also one of the largest objects in the sky, with an apparent diameter 6x the apparent diameter of the Moon. Here’s how to spot it.

  • The distance Earth-Sun is about 150 million km. The distance March-Sun is about 230 million km and the distance Jupiter-sun is about 780 million km. Betelgeuse, the eighth brightest star in the sky, has a radius of 600 million km!

  • The Sun represents 99% of the total mass of our solar system.

  • Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite in history, was about the size of a soccer ball and took about 100 minutes to orbit the Earth.

  • In 2009, two communications satellites, from the US and Russia, collided. This is the only time two man-made satellites have collided by accident.

  • NASA and DLR has 2 satellites in the same orbit chasing each other to measure gravitational anomalies. Their nicknames are Tom & Jerry.

  • One of the two LAGEOS satellites, two scientific geodynamical satellites, is planned to re-enter the atmosphere in 8.4 million years. Therefore, it holds a payload designed by Carl Sagan to indicate to future humanity some information about our current civilisation.

END OF TRANSMISSION.