In 1963, baseball pitcher Gaylord Perry remarked, "They'll put a man on the moon before I hit a home run." On July 20, 1969, a few hours after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Gaylord Perry hit his first of six home runs.
There are 3 basic ways of telling time. a) rotational : rotation of the earth b) dynamic: motion of the moon and planets c) atomic: oscillation within atoms.
In August 2023, India's Chandrayaan-3 mission became the first spacecraft to land near the Moon's south pole, making India the fourth country to soft-land on the Moon.
Italian scientist Galileo Galilei discovered Jupiter's four largest moons in 1610 using a telescope he improved himself.
Humans first landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down while Michael Collins orbited above in the command module.
An estimated 600 million people around the world watched the Apollo 11 Moon landing on TV, one of the largest audiences in history at the time.
Because the Moon has no wind or water to erode them, the footprints left by Apollo astronauts could last for millions of years.
The Apollo Guidance Computer that helped land Apollo 11 had only about 4 kilobytes of erasable memory, millions of times less than a modern smartphone.
Neil Armstrong had to steer the lunar module past a boulder-filled crater by hand, and Apollo 11 landed with less than a minute of descent fuel to spare.
Apollo 11 left a plaque on the Moon stating that the astronauts "came in peace for all mankind," signed by the three astronauts and President Richard Nixon.
Only 12 people have ever walked on the Moon, all of them American astronauts on Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972. Gene Cernan was the last to leave.
President Nixon had a speech ready called "In Event of Moon Disaster," written by speechwriter William Safire in case the Apollo 11 astronauts got stranded on the Moon.
When a circuit breaker switch broke on the lunar module, Buzz Aldrin used a felt-tip pen to push it in so the engine could fire and lift them off the Moon.
Shortly after landing, Buzz Aldrin quietly took communion inside the lunar module, which was kept off the public broadcast at the time.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the 1969 Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Pieces of the original Wright Flyer have traveled to the Moon on Apollo 11 and to Mars on NASA's Ingenuity helicopter.
In 1610, Galileo Galilei used his improved telescope to discover four of Jupiter's moons, which supported the idea that not everything orbits Earth.
Galileo's telescope wasn't strong enough to show Saturn's rings clearly, so he thought the planet had "ears" or two large moons on either side.
Astronaut Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the Moon in 1971.
"Houston" was the first word spoken from the Moon because Mission Control was at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Most of Uranus's moons, including Miranda, Oberon, and Titania, are named after characters from Shakespeare's plays.
Ashtanga students traditionally take rest days on full and new moon days.
In Hearts, "shooting the moon" means taking every heart and the queen of spades.
Aristotle argued that Earth is round, pointing to its curved shadow on the Moon during lunar eclipses.
Galileo observed that Venus has phases like the Moon, evidence that it orbits the Sun.
The Moon is drifting away from Earth by about 3.8 centimeters a year.
The Moon is tidally locked to Earth, which means it always shows us the same side.
Scientists think the Moon formed from debris after a Mars-sized object crashed into the young Earth.
The Moon has "moonquakes."
Apollo astronauts said Moon dust smelled like spent gunpowder.
Apollo astronauts left mirrors on the Moon that scientists still bounce lasers off to measure its distance.
Gravity on the Moon is about one-sixth as strong as on Earth.
"Moon trees" were grown from seeds that orbited the Moon on Apollo 14.
There's water ice in shadowed craters near the Moon's poles.
China's Chang'e 4 made the first landing on the far side of the Moon in 2019.
Mercury has no moons.
Mars's moon Phobos is slowly spiraling inward and is expected to break apart or crash into Mars in tens of millions of years.
Jupiter's moon Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system, and it's even bigger than Mercury.
Jupiter's moon Io is the most volcanically active place in the solar system.
Jupiter's moon Europa likely has an ocean beneath its icy surface, and NASA launched the Europa Clipper mission in 2024 to study it.
Saturn has the most known moons of any planet.
Saturn's moon Titan has a thick atmosphere and lakes of liquid methane, and the Huygens probe landed there in 2005.
Saturn's moon Enceladus shoots geysers of water into space.
NASA's Dragonfly mission will send a drone to Saturn's moon Titan.
Neptune's largest moon, Triton, orbits backward and will eventually be torn apart by Neptune's gravity.
Neptune's moon Triton has geysers of nitrogen.
Pluto's moon Charon is about half the size of Pluto.
Pluto is smaller than Earth's Moon.
A piece of the original Wright Flyer went to the Moon on Apollo 11 in 1969, and another flew to Mars on NASA's Ingenuity helicopter in 2021.
The Apollo Guidance Computer that helped land astronauts on the Moon had only about 4 KB of RAM, while a modern smartphone has millions of times more memory.
Apollo astronauts trained near Bend because the volcanic landscape resembles the Moon.