Did You Know: Heavenly Bodies ~ Emerald Quill

Sep 20, 2012

Did You Know: Heavenly Bodies

9/20/2012 Celestine Green No comments

The recent death of Astronaut Neil Armstrong made us pause to recall the moon landing and his “one small step for mankind”. Caught up with our day-to-day struggles, most of us don’t give much thought to things like space or its heavenly bodies. Take a pause, put on your thinking cap, and determine if the statements below are true or false. Ready, set, go!

· There are nine planets in our solar system.

· Solstice is the name of the day that the sun is farthest from the equator.

· When a remnant of material, ice, or rock falls from space to the ground on earth, it is called a meteorite.

· The patterns made by the stars are called constellations.

· Sally Ride was the first woman in space.

· Andromeda, Aquarius, and Canis Minor are all constellations.

· Pluto is the planet farthest from the sun.

· Mercury is the planet closest to the sun.

· Mars has two moons or natural satellites.

· Galileo discovered four of the 16 of Jupiter’s moons.

· Mercury and Venus have no natural satellites or moons.

· Earth is the fifth largest planet.

· The ionosphere is the outermost layer of the earth’s atmosphere.

· The earth’s atmosphere has five layers.

If you’ve taken a shot at guessing the correct answers, good for you. All the answers are true with one exception. Do you know which statement is false?

Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova is a retired Soviet cosmonaut and the first woman to have flown in space, having been selected from more than four hundred applicants and five finalists to pilot Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963. Since she was only honorarily inducted into the Soviet Air Force, she also became the first civilian to fly in space. During her three-day mission, she performed various tests on herself to collect data on the female body's reaction to spaceflight.

Sally Kristen Ride was an American physicist and astronaut. Ride joined NASA in 1978 and, at the age of 32, became the first American woman to enter into low Earth orbit in 1983. She died on July 23, 2012 at the age of 61 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.