1. Saturn's moon Titan has plenty of evidence of organic (life) chemicals in its atmosphere. 2.

Life is known to exist only on Earth, but in 1986 NASA found what they thought might be fossils of microscopic living things in a rock from Mars. 3. Most scientists say life's basic chemicals formed on the Earth. The astronomer Fred Hoyle said they came from space. 4. Oxygen is circulated around the helmet in space suits in order to prevent the visor from misting. 5. The middle layers of space suits a re blown up like a balloon to press against the astronaut's body. Without this pressure, the astronaut's body would boil! 6. The gloves included in the space suit have silicon rubber fingertips which allow the astronaut some sense of touch. 7. The full cost of a spacesuit is about $11 million although 70% of this is for the backpack and the control module. 8. Ever wondered how the pull of gravity is calculated between heavenly bodies? It's simple. Just multiply their masses together, and then divide the tot al by the square of the distance between them. 9. Glowing nebulae are named so because they give off a dim, red light, as the hydrogen gas in them is heated by radiation from the nearby stars. 10. The Drake Equation was proposed by astronomer Frank Drake t o work out how many civilizations there could be in our galaxy - and the figure is in millions. 11. SETI is the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence - the program that analyzes radio signals from space for signs of intelligent life. 12. The Milky Way galaxy we live in: is one among the BILLIONS in space. 13. The Milky Way galaxy is whirling rapidly, spinning our sun and all its other stars at around 100 million km per hour. 14. The Sun travels around the galaxy once every 200 million years a journey of 100,000 light years. 15. There may be a huge black hole in the very middle of the most of the galaxies. 16. The Universe is probably about 15 billion years old, but the estimations vary.

17. One problem with working out the age of the Universe is that th ere are stars in our galaxy which are thought to be 14 to 18 billion years old older than the estimated age of the Universe. So, either the stars must be younger, or the Universe older. 18. The very furthest galaxies are spreading away from us at more th an 90% of the speed of light. 19. The Universe was once thought to be everything that could ever exist, but recent theories about inflation (e.g. Big Bang) suggest our universe may be just one of countless bubbles of space time. 20. The Universe may have n either a centre nor an edge, because according to Einsteins theory of relativity, gravity bends all of space time around into an endless curve. 21. If you fell into a black hole, you would stretch like spaghetti. 22. Matter spiraling into a black hole is torn apart and glows so brightly that it creates the brightest objects in the Universe quasars. 23. The swirling gases around a black hole turn it into an electrical generator, making it spout jets of electricity billions of kilometers out into space. 24. The opposite of black holes are estimated to be white holes which spray out matter and light like fountains. 25. A day in Mercury lasts approximately as long as 59 days on earth. 26. Twice during Mercurys orbit, it gets so close to the Sun and speeds so much that the Sun seems to go backwards in the sky. 27. Nicolaus Copernicus was the astronomer who first suggested that the Sun was the centre, and that the Earth went round the sun. 28. The ideas of Copernicus came not from looking at the night sky, but from studying ancient astronomy. 29. As the earth turns, the stars come back to the same place in the night sky every 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.09 seconds. This is a sidereal day (star day). 30. When Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon for the first time, he said these famous words: Thats one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind. 31. From the moon, astronauts brought back 380 kg of Moon rock.

32. During the moon landing, a mirror was left on the Moons surface to reflect a laser beam which measured the Moons distance from the Earth with amazing accuracy. 33. The stars in each constellation are named after a Greek alphabet. 34. The brightest star in each constellation is called the Alpha Star, the next brightest Beta, and so on. 35. The distance to the planets is measured by bouncing radar signals off them and timing how long the signals take to get there and back. 36. Spacecrafts have double hulls (outer coverings) which protect them against other space objects that crash into them. 37. Manned Spacecrafts have life support systems that provide oxygen to breathe, usually mixed with nitrogen (as in ordinary air). Charcoal filters out smells/ 38. Spacecrafts toilets have to get rid of waste in low gravity conditions, Astronauts have to sit on a device which sucks away the waste. Solid waste is dried and dumped in space, but the water is saved. 39. A comets tail is made as it nears the Sun and begins to melt. A vast plume of gas millions of kilometers across is blown out behind by the solar wind. The tail is what you see, shining as the sunlight catches it. 40. The Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet smashed into Jupiter in July 1994, with the biggest crash ever witnessed. 41. Giant stars have burned all their hydrogen, and so burn helium, fusing helium atoms to make carbon. 42. The constellation of Cygnus, the Swan, contains the very biggest star in the known universe a hyper giant which is almost a million times as big as the sun. 43. Planet Uranus was discovered by William Herschel, who wanted to name the planet George, after King George III, but Uranus was eventually chosen. 44. The first rockets were made 1,000 years ago in China. 45. Robert Goddard launched the very first liquid-fuel rocket in 1926. 46. Over 100 artificial satellites are now launched into space every year, a few of which are space telescopes.

47. The lower a satellites orbit, the faster it must fly to avoid falling back to the Earth. Most satellites fly in low orbits, 300 km from the earth. 48. Hipparchus was the first astronomer to try to work out how far away the Sun is. 49. The red color of Mars is due to oxidized (rusted) iron in its soil. 50. Marss volcano Olympus Mons is the biggest in the sol ar system. It covers the same area as Ireland and is three times higher than our Mount Everest. 51. Planets have magnetic field around them because of the liquid iron in their cores. As the planets rotate, so the iron swirls, generating electric currents t hat create the magnetic field. 52. Earths atmosphere is the only atmosphere discovered till date that human can breathe in. 53. Earths atmosphere was formed from gases pouring out from volcanoes. 54. Jupiter has no surface for a spacecraft to land on because it is made mostly from helium gas and hydrogen. The massive pull of Jupiters gravity squeezes the hydrogen so hard that it is liquid. 55. Jupiter spins right round in less than 10 hours which mea ns that the planets surface is moving at nearly 50,000 km/hr. 56. The first successful planetary space probe was the USAs Mariner 2, which flew past Venus in 1962. 57. Voyager 2 has flown over 6 billion km and is heading out of the solar system after pas sing close to Neptune in 1989. 58. To save fuel on journeys to distant planets, space probes may use a nearby planets gravity to catapult them on their way. This is called slingshot. 59. Hubbles law showed that Universe is getting bigger and so must have started very small. This led to the idea of Big Bang. 60. Its believed that it was the impact of a big meteorite may have chilled the earth and wiped out all the dinosaurs. 61. The first astronomers thought the regular pulses from far space might be signals from aliens, and pulsars were jokingly called LGMs (short for Little Green Men). 62. Pulsars probably result from a supernova explosion - that is why most are found in the flat disc of the Milky Way, where supernovae occur.

63. Three moons have yet been found to have their own moons: Saturns moon Titan, Jupiters Lo, and Neptunes Triton. 64. The largest moon in the Solar System is the Jupiters moon Ganymede. 65. Saturn is not solid, but is made almost entirely of gas mostly liquid hydrogen and helium. Only in the planets very small core is there any rock. 66. Winds ten times stronger than a hurricane on Earth swirl around Saturns equator reaching up to 1100 km/h and they never let up: even for a moment. 67. The first space station was the So viet Salyut 1 launched in April 1971; its low orbit meant it stayed up only five months. 68. In April 2001, Dennis Tito became the first space tourist, ferried up to the ISS by the Russian Soyuz space shuttle. 69. Einsteins theory of general relativity sh ows that gravity not only pulls on matter, but also space and even Time itself. 70. Since the star Deneb is 1800 light years away, we see it as it was when the emperor Septimus Severius was ruling the Rome (AD 200). 71. With powerful telescopes, astronomers can see galaxies 2 billion light years away. This means we see them as they were when the only life forms in Earth were bacteria. 72. The slowest rotating planet is Venus, which takes 243.01 days to turn around. 73. The fastest spinning objects in the Universe are neutron stars these can rotate 500 times in just 1 second. 74. In summer in Uranus, the sun does not set for 20 years. In winter, darkness lasts for 20 years. In autumn, the sun rises and sets every 9 hours. 75. Uranuss moon Miranda is the weirdest moon of all. It seems to have been blasted apart, and then put together again. 76. Solar flares reach temperatures of 10 million C and have the energy of a million atom bombs. 77. True binary stars are two stars held together by one anothers gra vity, which spend their lives whirling around together like a pair of dancers.

78. Halley predicted that a comet he had discovered would return in 1758, 16 years after his death, and it really did. It was the first time a comets arrival had been predicted , and the comet was named after him as Halleys Comet. 79. Ceres is the biggest asteroid in the Solar System 940 km across, and 0.0002% the size of the earth. 80. The sun is about 5 billion years old and half a way through its life as a medium sized star it will probably live for around 10 billion years. 81. Neptunes mood Triton is the coldest place in the Solar System, with surface temperatures of -236C. 82. Voyager 2 will beam back data until 2020 as it travels beyond the edges of the Solar System. 83. The Pioneer 10 and 11 probes carry metal plaques with messages for aliens telling them about us. 84. Einsteins theory of Special Relativity (1905) shows that all measurements are relative, including time and speed. In other words, time and speed depen ds upon where you measure them. 85. When things are falling, their acceleration cancels out gravity, which is why astronauts in orbits are weightless. 86. The first space telescope was the Copernicus, sent out in 1972. 87. Astronauts learn Scuba diving whi ch helps them to deal with space walks. 88. Weightlessness makes astronauts grow several centimeters during a long mission. 89. The first living creature in space was the dog Laika on board Sputnik 2 in 1957. Sadly, she died when the spacecrafts oxygen supply ran out. 90. The first manned space flight was made in April 1961 by the Soviet Cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1. 91. The heart of a star reaches 16 million C. A grain o f sand this hot would kill someone 150 km away. 92. Stars twinkle because we see them through the wafting of the atmosphere.

93. The sun weighs 2,000 trillion trillion tones about 300,000 times as much as the Earth even though it is made almost entirel y of hydrogen and helium, the lightest gases in the Universe. 94. The sun gets hot because it is so big that the pressure in its core is so tremendous enough to force the nuclei of hydrogen atoms to fuse to make helium atoms. This nuclear reaction is like a gigantic atom bomb and it releases huge amounts of heat. 95. The nuclear fusion reactions in the Suns core send out billions of light photons every minute but they take 10 million years to reach its surface. 96. The Hiroshima bombs released 84 trillio n joules of energy. A supernova releases 125,000 trillion trillion times as such. 97. The most distant galaxies (quasars) have red shifts so big that they must be moving away from us at speeds approaching the speed of light. 98. When light waves from distant galaxies are stretched out his way, they look redder. This is called red shift. 99. The moons gravity is 17% of the Earths so astronauts in space suits can jump 4 m high on the moon. 100. The moon is the only other world that humans have set foot on. Because the moon has no atmosphere or wind, the footprints planted in its dusty surface in 1969 by the Apollo astronauts are still there today, perfectly preserved. 101. On the moons surface are large dark patches called seas because this is what people once believed they were. They are, in fact, lava flows from ancient volcanoes. 102. Quasars are the most distant known objects in the Universe. Even the nearest is billions of light years away. 103. The brightest quasar is 3C 273, 2 billion light years aw ay. 104. The brightest stars in the night sky are not actually stars, but the planets Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Mercury. 105. Jupiters moon Europa may have oceans of water beneath its dry surface and it is a major target in the search for life in the Solar System. 106. There may be 20 trillion galaxies in the Universe. 107. Galaxies are often found in a group or clusters. One cluster may have 30 or so galaxies in it.

108. In the 1970s the US Vikings 1 and 2 and the Soviet Mars 3 and 5 probes all reached the surface of Mars. 109. The Solar System has nine planets including Pluto, but Pluto may be an escaped moon or an asteroid not a planet. 110. The Milky Way belongs to a cluster of 30 galaxies called the Local Group, which is 7 million light years across. 111. The Virgo Cluster is 50 million light years away and is made up of 1000 galaxies. 112. For a satellite or a spacecraft to stay in orbit 200 km above the earth, it has to fly over 8 km/sec. 113. When a spacecraft reaches 140% of the orbital velocity i.e . 11.2 km/sec, it is going fast enough to break free of the Earths gravity. This is called escape velocity. 114. Saturns rings are sets of thin rings of ice, dust and tiny rocks, which orbit the planet around its equator. 115. A tablespoon of neutron star would weigh about ten billion tones. 116. The earth actually takes 365.24219 days to orbit the Sun, which is called one Solar Year. To compensate for the missing 0.242 days, the western calendar adds an extra day in February every fourth (leap) year, but misses out three leap years every four centuries. 117. X- Rays cannot reach the earths atmosphere, so astronomers can only detect them using space telescopes such as ROSAT. 118. The Sun has sunspots, the dark spots on the Suns photosphere (surface), 2000C cooler than the rest of the surface. 119. After the big bang, there was antimatter, the mirror image of matter. Antimatter and matter destroyed each other when they met, thus they annihilated. Matter just won, but the Universe was left almost empty. 120. The afterglow of the Big Bang can still be detected as microwave background radiation coming from all over space. 121. Dishes in the space telescopes have to be made accurate two billionths of a millimeter. 122. You can see another galaxy with the naked eye: the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.2 million light years away.

123. Dried up riverbeds show that Mars probably once had water in its surface. There is sometimes ice at the poles and maybe water underground. 124. For a satellite to fly off into the space, its momentum should be greater than the pull of gravity of the earth. 125. The future of the Universe may depend on how much dark matter there is. If there is too much, its gravity will ev entually stop the Universes expansion and make it shrink again.

Amazing Facts 1. Astronauts get taller when theyre in space. 2. Uranus was originally named George, in honour of King George III of Britain. 3. Neptune was the first planet in our sola r system to be discovered by mathematics. 4. Uranus is the only planet that rotates on its side and Venus is the only planet to spin backwards. 5. The first creature in space was Laika, a little Russian dog. 6. The path of the Moon's orbit around the Earth would fit easily inside the Sun. 7. Although the Apollo astronauts did use a special zero -gravity pen in the late 1960s, it is an urban myth that NASA spent millions of dollars trying to develop a pen that worked in space while the Russians used a pencil.

That the Sun makes up 99.86% of the Solar System's mass! That means that all the planets put together (including Jupiter) as well as all the asteroids only make up about 0.14% of the Solar System's mass That Jupiter's magnetic field is so massive that it pours billions of Watts into Earths magnetic field every day! That a massive body 100km wide travelling at over 512,000km/h crashed into Mercury to form the Caloris Basin. The impaact was so great it sent shockwaves round Mercury creating its hilly lineated terrain.

That just a pinhead of the Sun's raw material could kill someone up to 160 kilometres away! That the length of a Plutonian year is 248 of our years! That means that one orbit of the Sun takes about 2 and a half Earth centuries. That's a quarter of a Millenium! That Olympus Mons (on Mars) is the largest Volcanic mountain in the Solar System. It is 600 km across and 27 km high! And you thought Mount Everest (about 8 and a half km high) was tall! To see a great overhead picture of it click here. That a Supernova explosion produces more energy i n its first ten seconds than the Sun during the whole of its 10 billion year lifetime and that for a brief period, it creates more energy than the rest of a galaxy put together!! That the comet with the longest ever recorded tail is the Great Comet of 1843. Its tail stretched over 800 million kilometres! This is about the same distance the Earth is from Jupiter! That the energy in the sunlight we see today started out in the core of the Sun 30,000 years ago - it spent most of this time passing through t he dense atoms that make the sun and just 8 minutes to reach us once it had left the Sun! That almost all of the heavier elements in your body (eg calcium, iron, carbon) were made somewhere in supernovae explosions! That some rocks found on Earth are actually pieces of Mars! That Saturn has such a low density that it would float if put in water! That due to the fact that water expands when heated, the Atantic ocean increses in width by 3cm every year! That some volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io eject material at speeds of up to 1km/second! This is about 20 times faster than the volcanoes here on Earth can manage it! That the amount of the Sun's energy reaching the Earth's atmosphere (known as the Solar constant) is equivalent to 1.37 kw of electricity per square metre!

 In the weightlessness of space a frozen pea will explode if it comes in contact with Pepsi. The increased electricity used by modern appliance parts is causing a shift in the Earth's
magnetic field. By the year 2327, the North Pole will be located in mid-Kansas, while the South Pole will be just off the coast of East Africa.

The idea for "tribbles" in "Star Trek" came from gerbils, since some gerbils are actually
born pregnant.

Male rhesus monkeys often hang from tree branches by their amazing prehensile penises. Johnny Plessey batted .331 for the Cleveland Spiders in 1891, even though he spent the
entire season batting with a rolled -up, lacquered copy of the Toledo Post -Dispatch.

Smearing a small amount of dog feces on an insect bite will relieve the itching and swelling. The Boeing 747 is capable of flying upside -down if it weren't for the fact that the wings
would shear off when trying to roll it over.

The trucking company Elvis Presley work ed at as a young man was owned by Frank Sinatra. The only golf course on the island of Tonga has 15 holes, and there's no penalty if a monkey
steals your golf ball.

Legislation passed during WWI making it illegal to say "gesundheit" to a sneezer wa s never
repealed.

Manatees possess vocal chords which give them the ability to speak like humans, but don't
do so because they have no ears with which to hear the sound.

SCUBA divers cannot pass gas at depths of 33 feet or below. Catfish are the only animals that naturally have an ODD number of whiskers. Replying more than 100 times to the same piece of spam e -mail will overwhelm the sender's
system and interfere with their ability to send any more spam.

Polar bears can eat as many as 86 penguins in a single sitting.

 The first McDonald's restaurant opened for business in 1952 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and
featured the McHaggis sandwich.

The Air Force's F-117 fighter uses aerodynamics discovered during res earch into how
bumblebees fly.

You *can* get blood from a stone, but only if contains at least 17 percent bauxite. Silly Putty was "discovered" as the residue left behind after the first latex condoms were
produced. It's not widely publicized for o bvious reasons.

Approximately one-sixth of your life is spent on Wednesdays. The skin needed for elbow transplants must be taken from the scrotum of a cadaver. The sport of jai alai originated from a game played by Incan priests who held cats by their
tails and swung at leather balls. The cats would instinctively grab at the ball with their claws, thus enabling players to catch them.

A cat's purr has the same romance-enhancing frequency as the voice of singer Barry White. The typewriter was invented by Hungarian immigrant Qwert Yuiop, who left his "signature"
on the keyboard.

The volume of water that the Giant Sequoia tree consumes in a 24 -hour period contains
enough suspended minerals to pave 17.3 feet of a 4 -lane concrete freeway.

King Henry VIII slept with a gigantic axe. Because printed materials are being replaced by CD -ROM, microfiche and the Internet,
libraries that previously sank into thei r foundations under the weight of their books are now in danger of collapsing in extremely high winds.

In 1843, a Parisian street mime got stuck in his imaginary box and consequently died of
starvation.

Touch-tone telephone keypads were originally planned to have buttons for Police and Fire
Departments, but they were replaced with * and # when the project was cancelled in favor of developing the 911 system.

Human saliva has a boiling point three times that of regular water. Calvin, of the "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip, was patterned after President Calvin
Coolidge, who had a pet tiger as a boy.

 Watching an hour-long soap opera burns more calories than watching a three -hour baseball
game.

Until 1978, Camel cigarettes contained minute particles of real camels. You can actually sharpen the blades on a pencil sharpener by wrapping your pencils in
aluminum foil before inserting them.

To human taste buds, Zima is virtually indistinguishable f rom zebra urine. Seven out of every ten hockey-playing Canadians will lose a tooth during a game. For
Canadians who don't play hockey, that figure drops to five out of ten.

A dog's naked behind leaves absolutely no bacteria when pressed against car pet. A team of University of Virginia researchers released a study promoting the practice of
picking one's nose, claiming that the health benefits of keeping nasal passages free from infectious blockages far outweigh the negative social connotations.

Among items left behind at Osama bin Laden's headquarters in Afghanistan were 27 issues
of Mad Magazine. Al Qaeda members have admitted that bin Laden is reportedly an avid reader.

Urine from male cape water buffaloes is so flammable that some tribe s use it for lantern
fuel.

At the first World Cup championship in Uruguay, 1930, the soccer balls were actually
monkey skulls wrapped in paper and leather.

Every Labrador retriever dreams about bananas. If you put a bee in a film canister for t wo hours, it will go blind and leave behind its weight
in honey.

Due to the angle at which the optic nerve enters the brain, staring at a blue surface during
sex greatly increases the intensity of orgasms.

Never hold your nose and cover your mouth when sneezing, as it can blow out your eyeballs. Centuries ago, purchasing real estate often required having one or more limbs amputated in
order to prevent the purchaser from running away to avoid repayment of the loan. Hence an expensive purchase was said to cost "an arm and a leg."

When Mahatma Gandhi died, an autopsy revealed five gold Krugerrands in his small
intestine.

 Aardvarks are allergic to radishes, but only during summer months. Coca-Cola was the favored drink of Pharaoh Ramses. An inscription found in his tomb, when
translated, was found to be almost identical to the recipe used today.

If you part your hair on the right side, you were born to be carnivorous. If you part it on the
left, your physical and psychological make -up is that of a vegetarian.

When immersed in liquid, a dead sparrow will make a sound like a crying baby. In WWII the US military planned to airdrop over France propaganda in the form of Playboy
magazine, with coded messages hidden in the models' turn -ons and turn-offs. The plan was scrapped because of a staple shortage due to rationing of metal.

Although difficult, it's possible to start a fire by rapidly rubbing together two Cool Ranch
Doritos.

Napoleon's favorite type of wood was knotty chestnut. The world's smartest pig, owned by a mathematics teacher in Madison, WI, memorized the
multiplication tables up to 12.

Due to the natural "momentum" of the ocean, saltwater fish cannot swim backwards. In ancient Greece, children of wealthy families were dipped in olive oil at birth to keep them
hairless throughout their lives.

It is nearly three miles farther to fly from Amarillo, Texas to Louisville, Kentucky than it is
to return from Louisville to Amarillo.

The "nine lives" attributed to cats is probably due to their having nine primary whiskers. The original inspiration for Barbie dolls c omes from dolls developed by German
propagandists in the late 1930s to impress young girls with the ideal notions of Aryan features. The proportions for Barbie were actually based on those of Eva Braun.

The Venezuelan brown bat can detect and dodge ind ividual raindrops in mid-flight, arriving
safely back at his cave completely dry.