Archives: Fun and Games

The only spacecraft to have visited the sixth planer Saturn are Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.This image was taken by Voyager 2 from a distance of 101,000 km (63,000 miles). After studying Saturn Voyager 2 headed to Uranus.Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are often referred to as the gas giants, as they all have a small rocky core with an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. All the gas giants have rings but none are as magnificent or as visible as those of Saturn. Saturn’s nine rings are made up of small rock and ice particles and extend thousands of km (miles) from the planet.However, the depth of the rings is only 10m (30 feet).Saturn has at least 62 moons, of which only 53 have names and the largest is Titan. Saturn is named after the Roman god of agriculture.

This is a montage of images taken by Voyager 2 showing Uranus and its five major moons. In order of size these are Oberon, Titania, Umbriel, Ariel and Miranda, – all named after characters from works by the famous authors Shakespeare and Pope. Miranda, the smallest of these five moons, has a giant canyon twelve times deeper than our Grand Canyon.The atmosphere on Uranus contains helium and hydrogen but also ammonia and methane and it is the latter that gives the planet its blue-green colour. It is the coldest planet in the solar system and the third largest.Uranus is the 7th planet from the Sun, was discovered by William Herschel in 1781 and is named after the Greek god of the sky.

The 8th planet Neptune was discovered by the German astronomer Galle in 1846. Neptune’s largest moon Triton was discovered just 17 days later by William Lassell. Neptune is more than 30 times further away from the Sun than the Earth.In 2011 Neptune completed its first 165-year orbit of the Sun since its discovery in 1846.Voyager 2 tracked a Great Dark Spot on Neptune.This was a hurricane, spinning anti-clockwise, moving at 1,200 km (750 miles) per hour and large enough to contain the entire Earth! The moon Triton is the coldest object so far measured in the solar system. Ice volcanoes on its surface shoot out liquid nitrogen, methane and dust, which then freezes and falls back to the surface as snow.

The Space Shuttle programme was developed to send a manned vehicle into space that was able to return and be reusable. The first Space Shuttle, Columbia, was launched in April 1981. Only carrying two astronauts, it stayed in orbit a little over two days. Between 1981 and 2011 there were five Space Shuttle vehicles – Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour.On their 135 missions the Shuttles took the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit, carried components and crew for the International Space Station and carried out many scientific experiments. The Shuttles had a portable laboratory called the Spacelab, which accompanied them on 32 missions.

Extravehicular activity or EVA refers to any activity done by an astronaut outside of a spacecraft and outside of the Earth’s atmosphere.This can refer to moonwalks and spacewalks. The first spacewalk was carried out in 1965 by Russian cosmonaut Alexey Leonov who spent 12 minutes outside of his Voskhod 2 spacecraft. The first untethered spacewalk was made by Bruce McCandless in 1984 during a Challenger mission. He used a propulsion unit strapped to his back to manoeuvre himself.

The Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) is commonly known as the Lunar Rover or moon buggy.It was a battery powered vehicle used in the last three Apollo missions – 15, 16 and 17. The vehicle was transported to the moon in the Apollo Lunar Module. It could carry two astronauts and was designed to extend the possible area of exploration on the lunar surface. The three LRVs were left on the moon after each mission and remain there today.

In 2003 NASA launched its second Mars Exploration Rover (MER). Both Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, landed on different sides of Mars in 2004. Their missions were planned to last three months but Spirit continued to work for six years. Opportunity is still active – lasting for over 48 times its designed lifespan and surviving life on Mars which have included dust storms and meteorites.

This Soyuz rocket TMA-19M was launched in 2015 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. It carried the crew of the 46th Expedition to the International Space Station including Tim Peake, the first British astronaut to work aboard the ISS.Expedition 1 was in the year 2000 and lasted 141 days. In more recent expeditions some astronauts stay aboard the ISS and transfer from one Expedition to the next, staying as long as one year.

This image shows the Hubble Space Telescope being taken into low orbit by the Space Shuttle Discovery.It was photographed 332 miles above the Earth. Hubble is one of the biggest and well known space telescopes and is named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble.Its position outside of the Earth’s atmosphere means that it can take very high quality images into deep space. Hubble has allowed breakthroughs in physics, such as finding out how fast the universe is growing.