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NASAS first men in space

May 5, 1961

NASA's first high-profile program involving human spaceflight was Project Mercury, an effort to learn if humans could survive the rigors of spaceflight. On May 5, 1961, Alan B. Shepard Jr. became the first American to fly into space, when he rode his Mercury capsule on a 15-minute suborbital mission. John H. Glenn Jr. became the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth on February 20, 1962. With six flights, Project Mercury achieved its goal of putting piloted spacecraft into Earth orbit and retrieving the astronauts safely. Project Gemini built on Mercury's achievements and extended NASA's human spaceflight program to spacecraft built for two astronauts. Gemini's 10 flights also provided NASA scientists and engineers with more data on weightlessness, perfected reentry and splashdown procedures, and demonstrated rendezvous and docking in space. One of the highlights of the program occurred during Gemini 4, on June 3, 1965, when Edward H. White, Jr., became the first U.S. astronaut to conduct a spacewalk.

man on moon

May 25, 1961

The singular achievement of NASA during its early years involved the human exploration of the Moon, Project Apollo. Apollo became a NASA priority on May 25 1961, when President John F. Kennedy announced "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth." A direct response to Soviet successes in space, Kennedy used Apollo as a high-profile effort for the U.S. to demonstrate to the world its scientific and technological superiority over its cold war adversary. In response to the Kennedy decision, NASA was consumed with carrying out Project Apollo and spent the next 11 years doing so. This effort required significant expenditures, costing $25.4 billion over the life of the program, to make it a reality. Only the building of the Panama Canal rivaled the size of the Apollo program as the largest nonmilitary technological endeavor ever undertaken by the United States; only the Manhattan Project was comparable in a wartime setting. Although there were major challenges and some failures - notably a January 27, 1967 fire in an Apollo capsule on the ground that took the lives of astronauts Roger B. Chaffee, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, and Edward H. White Jr. Jr. - the program moved forward inexorably.

apllo mission's

Oct 24, 1968

Less than two years later, in October 1968, NASA bounced back with the successful Apollo 7 mission, which orbited the Earth and tested the redesigned Apollo command module. The Apollo 8 mission, which orbited the Moon on December 24-25, 1968, when its crew read from the book of Genesis, was another crucial accomplishment on the way to the Moon.

leaving the moon

Dec 21, 1968

•December 21st 1968, was the first time that humans truly left Earth, when Apollo 8 became the first manned space vehicle to leave Earth orbit and to orbit the Moon.

space shuttl

Apr 12, 1981

After a gap of six years, NASA returned to human spaceflight in 1981, with the advent of the Space Shuttle. The Shuttle's first mission, STS-1, took off on April 12, 1981, demonstrating that it could take off vertically and glide to an unpowered airplane-like landing. On STS-6, during April 4-9, 1983, F. Story Musgrave and Donald H. Peterson conducted the first Shuttle EVA, to test new spacesuits and work in the Shuttle's cargo bay. Sally K. Ride became the first American woman to fly in space when STS-7 lifted off on June 18, 1983, another early milestone of the Shuttle program.

planets discoverd

May 7, 1997

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn have been known for a very long time...but no one knows when they were first seen. Being such bright objects in the sky, they have been known and observed by ancient civilizations. Uranus was first recorded in 1690, but thought to be a star. William Herschel discovered it as a planet in 1781. Neptune was discovered in 1846....by James Challis (who recorded it first, but did not realize what it was) and Johann Galle (who knew exactly what he was observing). Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. Laura Whitlock and Tim Kallman for the Ask an Astrophysicist team Questions on this topic are no longer responded to by the "Ask an Astrophysicist" service. See http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/ask_an_astronomer.html for help on other astronomy Q&A

life on the moon

May 12, 2010

Want to know what life will look like on other planets? Look no farther than these five creatures, who are already prepared for life on Saturn's moon Titan - or in the hard vacuum of deep space.Unlike humans, with our pesky need for things like oxygen and sugar, some creatures are more flexible in the habitats where they feel comfortable. Here are five lifeforms who are prepared to live on other planets right now.Worms who live on methane iceThe bizarre creature you see above is a worm who lives on a slab of methane ice pushing up from the seafloor near the coast of Mexico. According to Penn State, whose researchers helped discover this new form of life:

fack mars mission

Jun 3, 2010

A fake mission to Mars is getting under way at a research institute in Moscow, where six men will spend the next year and a half inside a mock spaceship. The international "crew" includes two men from Europe, one from China and three from Russia. They'll spend the next 520 days living inside just a few bus-sized modules at Russia's Institute for Biomedical Problems.The team will have to put up with endless astronaut food, the grind of exercise and maintenance work, science experiments, fake emergencies — plus extreme isolation from the outside world."We get to see what happens to them over the course of an awful long time, and that's not been done before," says Nick Kanas, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco who worked on a 105-day pilot study leading up to this new Mars simulation."The notion of being with the same people, without escape, for a long period of time, is perhaps more stressful than a lot of people can think," says Kanas.Kanas has studied the psychology of space station crews who have spent up to seven months in space. But he notes that a real mission to Mars would take far longer — probably about 2 1/2 years. That means the crew would be too far away to enjoy things that NASA uses to cheer up space station astronauts. There'd be no resupply missions, so no fresh food or surprise presents. And forget about talking to Mission Control in real time. "On Mars, you ask a question, you've got to wait a half an hour or longer to get the answer," says Kanas. That's why the new Mars500 study will include a 20-minute time delay for communications with the outside world. Researchers will carefully monitor the crew's physical and psychological condition as the men pretend to travel to Mars, explore the Martian surface, and then head home.Gallery: Views From NASA's Mars RoversSome things can't be simulated — like microgravity. And real space travelers to Mars would have to deal with the psychological impact of facing actual danger. But in this Mars simulation, if there's a serious medical or psychiatric problem, researchers could just open the hatch, says physician Christian Otto, who has worked with NASA to study how people are affected by sensory deprivation and social isolation. Otto has done two yearlong postings in Antarctica and notes that when you're there in winter, with no chance of rescue, "you know that the rest of your crewmates and yourself are going to have to solve any problem that comes up." That's not true for the Mars500 crew.Still, Otto thinks this study is important and unique because of its long duration. He knows from his own experiences that people's mood and performance decline as isolation stretches past six months to a year. "What happens when we go beyond a year, when we go beyond a year and a half, when we go beyond two years?" he asks, noting that there's a real dearth of research.Just a few Russian cosmonauts have spent more than a year living continuously in space, says Otto, and no American has done so.The current American record-holder for the longest single space mission is Michael Lopez-Alegria, who spent 215 days in orbit. He says he found it surprisingly OK. "I think what keeps people interested and happy is being busy, and we were certainly busy for the whole time we were there," he says. He did find himself missing ordinary social things, like getting to see different people, and having conversations about sports or politics over dinner. But he could always look out the window and gaze back home."Looking out the window and seeing the Earth below, and seeing places you recognize and where you grew up and places you visited has a lot to do with keeping sane, so to speak," Lopez-Alegria says. That's a view the fake spaceship in Moscow won't have. But the first real mission to Mars wouldn't have it either. From so far away, the crew would see the Earth as just a tiny speck in space. "No human being ever in the history of man has seen the Earth as an insignificant dot in space," says Kanas. "And what the impact of that kind of isolation will be is hard to predict at this point."

how hot is the sun

Oct 10, 2011

The surface, or photosphere, of the sun is about 10,000° Fahrenheit (5,500° Celsius). Cool, dark areas of magnetic disturbance that erupt on the photosphere, called sunspots, are only about 6,700° Fahrenheit (4,000° Celsius).The layer of the sun's atmosphere that lies just beyond the photosphere, called the chromosphere, is only about 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) thick. Where it meets the photosphere, the chromosphere is about 7,800° Fahrenheit (4,300° Celsius). The temperature rises throughout the chromosphere. Where the chromosphere merges with the sun's outermost atmospheric layer, the corona, it is about 180,000° Fahrenheit (100,000° Celsius). Temperatures rise to 3,600,000° Fahrenheit (2,000,000° Celsius) in the part of the corona that's farthest from the sun.The sun is hottest at its center—about 27,000,000° Fahrenheit (15,000,000° Celsius)!Sources: Abell, George O. Realm of the Universe, 5th ed., pp. 225-28; Asimov, Isaac. Isaac Asimov's Guide to Earth and Space, pp. 159-61; Moore, Patrick. Atlas of the Solar System, p. 19.

moon a star

Apr 2, 2012

Moon swings close to star Regulus and Mars on April 2, 2012 Tonight for April 2, 2012 On April 2, 2012 – along with Venus and Jupiter in the west after sunset (Venus above, Jupiter below) – you can see the waxing gibbous moon as it swings close to the sparkling blue-white star Regulus and the red planet Mars. Regulus is the brightest in the constellation Leo the Lion. This star depicts the Lion’s Heart.