Exploring Space!

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Exploring Space!

• Everything you did and did not want to know about
  how humans have explored space!

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Way way back

• Astronomers have been studying space since way
  way back (the ancient Greeks and Romans)
• In 1543 Copernicus proposed the idea that the
  earth orbits the sun.
• The earth was NOT the center of the universe!

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Telescopes

• Adapted by Galileo Galilei in 1609
• Telescopes gather light and often magnify it to
  visual proportions
• Telescopes can gather visual light,
• or radio waves, or infrared radiation

Yerkes telescope in Wisconsin, The largest
refracting telescope in the world
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More telescopes!

• Some telescopes are in orbit around Earth.
• The Hubble Telescope is in orbit and provides
  some of the clearest images of distant objects

Picture of distant galaxies from the Hubble
space telescope
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Space travel
Sputnik 1 1st Satellite

• The idea of going into space or sending people
  into space started in the 1950s
• 1957 The Soviet Union launched the first
  satellite to orbit earth
• 1958 The Soviet Union sent the first human into
  space

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Race to the Moon!

• The United States Won!
• NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space
  Administration) created the Apollo program to try
  to reach the moon
• July 11, 1969 the crew from Apollo 11 walked on
  the surface of the moon

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Researching the moon

• NASA achieved 5 more moon landing between 1969
  and 1972
• The Apollo program helped scientists learn about
  the moons surface and interior

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The International Space Station!

• Space station a satellite in which people can
  live and work for long periods
• Russia, US and 15 other nations began building
  the Intertational Space Station in 1998.
• The first crew was in 2000
• As big as 2 football fields
• Crew makes observations of earth and perform
  experiments especially about gravity

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The Space Shuttle

• How NASA launches the ISS crew into space
• First Space Shuttle, Columbia was launched in
  1981
• Can be used over and over again
• Have been launched more than 100 times since 1981

http//www.aee.odu.edu/shuttlerepository/shuttlere
pair.html
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Unmanned Spacecraft

• We cannot send humans to other planets
• The trip is too long, too expensive and too the
  conditions are too harsh on many other planets
• Carry instruments that test the compositions and
  characteristics of planets

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Flybys
Picture the Voyager 2 took of Saturn

• A spacecraft passes one or more planets without
  orbiting them
• Voyager 2 was sent in the 1980s and flew by
  Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune

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Orbiters
Orbiter of Mars

• Target a specific planet to study and orbit that
  planet over a long period of time
• Data is collected and sent back to earth as radio
  waves
• Help create detailed maps of planets

Lunar orbiter
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Landers

• A craft designed to land on a planets surface
• Have been to the Moon, Venus, and Mars

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Probes

• A spacecraft that usually drops into a planets
  atmosphere, but only work for a short time before
  they are destroyed by conditions on a planet
• Useful for studying the deep atmosphere of the
  giant planets like Jupiter

The Galileo probe which dropped into the
Atmosphere of Jupiter
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Quiz Was this Spacecraft a probe, a lander, an
orbiter, or a flyby?

• 1. Luna 1 in 1959 flew by the moon
• 2. In 1966 Luna 9 made a soft landing on the
  moons surface
• 3. The Galileo spacecraft in 1995 began to orbit
  Jupiter but released a ______ which studied
  Jupiters atmosphere for 1 hour before it was
  destroyed.
• 4. Magellan in 1989 made a map of the surface of
  Venus by revolving around the planet
• 5. The Viking 2 was sent in 1975 to Mars to roam
  the surface and search for life

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Brief Timeline of Space

• 1609 Galileo invents the telescope
• 1924 An astronomer named Edwin Hubble confirms
  the existence of other galaxies
• 1957 First artificial satellite Sputnik was
  launched by the Soviet Union
• 1958 The National Aeronatics and Space
  Administration (NASA) is established to oversee
  the exploration of space
• 1969 First man, Neil Armstrong walks on the moon
• 1977 The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are launched to
  Jupiter, Saturn and beyond, they are now 10
  billion km away and still sending back pictures
  to earth
• 1981 The first space shuttle, Columbia, was
  launched by NASA
• 1992 Astronomers discover the first planet
  outside our solar system
• 2000 The first 3 man crew was sent to the
  International Space Station