6” Oe me a eee Oe a ee eee ES eee Page 8 — Over The Edge — March 3, 1997 Look up...Way up! The random Prepared by ADO It wasn’t possible to do a sky update for this week so I though everyone would enjoy a few random space facts to go over. Don't forget to read my article on the editorial page. - The Planets: Did you know that liquid water does not currently occur on Mars because of the cold temperatures and low atmospheric pressures. Only water ice and water gas (vapor) are stable. However, large channels on Mars appear to have been cut by outflows of liquid water during Mars’ distant past which may have had warmer temperatures and a much thicker atmosphere. Almost all of the Oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere has been produced by living organisms. Oxygen accounts for 21% of our atmosphere, with Nitrogen making up 78%, and.a mixture of other gases composing the remaining 1%. Oxygen only occurs asa minor constituent in the atmospheres of other planets in our Solar System. Did you know that the most volcanically active body in the solar system besides the Earth is Jupiter’s moon Io. Erupting volcanoes were discovered on Io by the Voyager spacecraft: Pluto’s elliptical orbit sometimes brings it inside of the orbit of Neptune for a few years. We are currently in one of those periods, so right now Neptune is the farthest planet from the Sun. : The largest canyon system in the Solar System is Valles Marineris on Mars. It is more than 3000 miles long and so would stretch from California to New York. In some places it reaches 3 miles in depth and 200 miles in width. Jupiter’s magnetosphere is the largest single structure inside the Solar System. If you could - see it with your eyes, it would appear larger than our full Moon. Jupiter’s moon Europa may have a liquid water “ocean” far beneath its water ice space facts pressure you would. experience 3000 feet: (approx. 1-km) down in the Earth’s oceans, i.e., about 90 times the _ pressure at the Earth’s surface. __ Jupiter’s moon lo, less covered surface. Did you know that some of the moons in our Solar System are larger than some of the planets? Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System, and Saturn’s moon Titan are both larger than the planets Mercury and Pluto. The Earth’s Moon, Jupiter’s moons Callisto, Io, and Europa, and Neptune’s moon Triton are all larger than Pluto, but smaller than Mercury. The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a hurricane-like storm system. It is large enough that two Earths could fit across it. The Red Spot has been around since at least the early 1600’s when it was first detected shortly after the invention of the telescope. On average, the distance from Pluto to the Sun is approximately 40 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Put a different way, if a scale model were constructed with the Sun on the California coast and the Earth about 75 miles inland, then on the same scale Pluto would be in New York. If you added up the mass of all of the thousands of known asteroids in the asteroid belt, the total would be less than ten percent the mass of the Earth’s moon. The atmospheric pressure you would experience on the surface of Venus _ is ~~ : . t+ a than 1/3 the size of Earth, puts out twice as much heat as the Earth.. This is primarily due to tidal forces from Jupiter’s enormous gravitational field causing a constant squeezing and stretching of Io. Heat generated by that squeezing and; stretching accounts for! Io being the most volcanically active body in the Solar System. The Earth’s Moon has only about 1/80th the mass of Earth. Spacecraft: It only takes the Space Shuttle about 8 minutes: to accelerate to its orbital speed of more than 17,000 miles per hour. The Space Shuttle main engine weighs 1/7th as much as a train engine, but delivers as much horsepower as 39 train engines. Pioneer 11’s speed going past Jupiter was over 107,000 mph, the fastest speed ever traveled by a human-made object. The Galileo probe, weighing in at 339 kilograms (750 pounds), will enter Jupiter’s atmosphere at 170,000 kilometers per hour (106,000 mph), or more than 50 times faster than a bullet shot out of a rifle. The probe will experience deceleration forces as high as 230 times Earth’s gravity. In about two minutes, the orbiter’s speed will be slowed to about 1,600 kilometers per hour (1,000 mph). The Voyager spacecraft delivery accuracy at Neptune (100 km or 60 mi.) (62 mi), divided by the trip distance of 7,128,603,456 km (4,429,508,700 mi), was the equivalent of sinking a 3630 km (2260 mi.) golf shot. Stump your friends: who was the last astronaut to fly in space alone in a spacecraft? For you space NOT SURE WHAT YOU WANT? You've taken all or most of your chosen degree and ‘want more information on career options. You have an active interest in people; You are mature and energetic. You would like a career where you help people solve their problems in life. We offer... Canada’s First Psychiatric Nursing Degree of at Brandon University Brandon University offers a unique baccalaureate degree program that leads to a Bachelor of Science in Psychiatric Nursing and eligibility for registration as a Psychiatric Nurse. If you already have courses toward a Bachelor of Science or other University degree, applicable courses can be transferred to our program. Enrollment is limited. Please contact our Program Coordinator for more information: Tel. (204) 727-7456 or (204) 727-7409 / Fax: (204) 728-7292 e-mail: admissions@brandonu.ca BRANDON UNIVERSITY Psychiatric Nursing Department of Nursing and Health Studies Brandon University, 270 - 18th Street red 8 *NaDag AY? Brandon, Manitoba R7A 6A9 buffs who immediately thought of Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, think again. It was Apollo 17 command module pilot Ron Evans, who circled the Moon alone while astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt went to the surface. Sizes and Distances: Size comparisons: About 1000 Earths would fit inside Jupiter, and about 1000 Jupiters would fit inside the Sun. Our Solar System, by virtue of its proper motion through our galaxy (the Milky Way) is moving at a speed of 43,000 miles per hour toward the globular cluster of stars known as M13 in the constellation Hercules. Some of the objects visible in Hubble Space Telescope images are nearly four billion times fainter than the limits of human vision. Comet Hyakutake’s orbit will carry it over 1000 astronomicai units from the Sun before it once again heads back towards the Sun in another 7,000 years (1 astronomical unit = the average distance from the Earth to the Sun = 93 million miles = 150 million km). Such Brandon College established 1899 * Brandon University chartered 1967 rogram large orbits are not-unusual for long-period comets. For comparison Pluto is on average 40 astronomical units from the Sun and orbits the Sun once every 248 years. The largest mountain in the Solar System is Olympus Mons on Mars. At a height of over 26 km (16 mi.), it is nearly 3 times taller than Mt. Everest. Olympus Mons is _ also enormous in its width: 600 km (360 mi.) across. The Sun: The Sun looks 1600 times fainter from Pluto than it does from the Earth. Comets’ tails point away from the Sun at all times. Thus, when a comet is moving away from the Sun, its tail is actually leading. Comet tails are caused by dust and gas being lost from the comet and then pushed away from the Sun by the solar wind (charged particles moving out from the Sun) and by radiation pressure from the Sun. The Earth orbits the Sun at an average velocity of approximately 30 kilometers per second (18 miles per second). Planets closer to the Sun travel faster in their orbits and planets further away travel slower.