49 facts, each with a source

Space facts

Space facts are where the numbers stop making sense. A total eclipse only works because the Sun is 400 times wider than the Moon and 400 times further away. Venus spins backwards, some of the static on an old TV was the Big Bang, and almost all of the universe is missing. Every fact here links to its source.

Mars

Mars has a volcano three times taller than Everest.
Sunsets on Mars are blue.
Olympus Mons is around 600 km wide with slopes averaging about five degrees.

Moon

A total eclipse is an astonishing coincidence.
The Moon is escaping us, an inch and a half every year.
The Moon has a tail, like a comet.
The dark side of the Moon is not dark.
Footprints on the Moon will outlast every city on Earth.
Seismometers left by Apollo crews showed the Moon ringing for up to an hour after an impact.
Rhythms preserved in 1.4-billion-year-old rock record a day of roughly 18 hours.

Black Holes

One teaspoon of a neutron star weighs about a billion tons.

Cosmology

Some of the static on an old TV was the Big Bang.
Almost all of the universe is missing.
Astronomers aimed a telescope at an empty patch of sky for ten days.
Every atom in you heavier than iron came from a dying star.
The Sun loses four million tonnes of itself every second.
Andromeda is heading straight for us.
The sunlight on your skin is tens of thousands of years old.
There is a cloud of alcohol drifting between the stars.
Everything humans have ever broadcast fills a tiny bubble.
There are more stars than grains of sand on Earth.

Asteroids

Almost all of the roughly 1,500 injuries from the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor came from flying glass.
There is a single asteroid worth more than the world economy.
Earth has a quasi-moon called Kamoʻoalewa that loops near us as it orbits the Sun.

Space History

The cover of the Voyager Golden Record carries a patch of electroplated uranium-238.
There is a sports car orbiting the Sun.
Apollo 12 was struck by lightning 36 seconds after liftoff, then again 16 seconds later.
NASA's Genesis capsule hit the Utah desert at around 300 km/h in 2004 because its deceleration sensors were installed backwards, so the parachute never fired.
Hubble launched with a mirror polished to within a fraction of a wavelength of the wrong shape.
Voyager 1 still stores data on an eight-track digital tape recorder.
William Herschel named the planet he discovered in 1781 after his king: George's Star.

Astronauts

The Apollo 11 crew were sealed in a converted Airstream trailer in case they carried lunar microbes.
Astronauts watch 16 sunrises a day.
A flame in zero gravity turns into a slow blue sphere.
Apollo astronauts said Moon dust smelled like spent gunpowder once they were back inside the lander.

More space facts

The planet closest to the Sun has ice on it.
Averaged over time, the planet closest to Earth is Mercury.
Saturn is losing its rings.
On Venus, the Sun rises in the west.
Mercury is closer to the Sun. Venus is hotter anyway.
Saturn would float in a bathtub.
Jupiter's great storm is shrinking.
Uranus is lying on its side.
A day on Venus is longer than its year. Also shorter. Both.
The winds on Neptune break the sound barrier.
Venus barely spins, but its sky screams at 360 km/h.
Saturn's moon Iapetus has a ridge of mountains up to 13 km high running almost exactly along its equator, giving it the outline of a walnut.
Rain on Titan falls as methane, in drops about twice the width of Earth's, drifting down at walking pace through air four times denser than ours.
Pluto was found in 1930 and takes 248 years to circle the Sun.