On April 12th, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin became the first human in space. His remotely controlled Vostok 1 spacecraft lofted him to an altitude of 200 miles and carried him once around planet Earth. Commenting on the first view from space he reported, “The sky is very dark; the Earth is bluish. Everything is seen very cleary.
Between the launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957 and 1 January 2008, approximately 4600 launches have placed some 6000 satellites into orbit, of which about 400 are travelling beyond geostationary orbit or on interplanetary trajectories.Today, it is estimated that only 800 satellites are operational - and there’s a LOT of junk…see hi-res images.
The gas cloud surrounding a star that went nova in 2002 looks uncannily like the logo for the popular browser Firefox.
Some of the world’s smartest astronomers estimate that some of the more advanced technological civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy may be 1.5 gigayears older that Earth (that’s 1.5 billion years older). As Arthur C. Clarke wrote: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The European Space Agency has just released images showing all the satellites and human-made debris now orbiting space as a result of 51 years of launching stuff to space since Sputnik launched in 1957.
The Earth, Heliophysics, Planets, and Astrophysics. The site offers some great in-depth information about all sort of space stuff.
At first, he couldn’t see it, but searching with binoculars along a cloudy western horizon near sunset, photographer Laurent Laveder finally spotted a delicate lunar crescent. Captured in this dramatic picture on April 6th from Bretagne, France, the Moon was only 15 hours and 38 minutes old.