Space is completely silent because there is no medium for sound to travel.

The closest stars are trillions of miles away from us. Most of the stars we see in the sky with the naked eye are a few hundred light years away.

The light we see from distant stars could be 2.5 million years old and the stars could already be dead.

A supernova is the explosion of a star that takes place in just seconds. This event is the largest explosion that takes place in space and it produces a massive amount of energy.  A supernova can occur at the end of a single star’s lifetime.

The average temperature in space is minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit.

The largest water discovery ever found was a massive water vapor cloud around 10 million light-years away, holding 140 trillion times the mass of water contained in all the Earth’s oceans.

Comets are cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, ice and dust that release gases when they pass close to the Sun causing a glowing tail that can stretch millions of miles.

Asteroids are small, rocky objects that orbit the Sun. Although asteroids orbit the Sun like planets, they are much smaller than planets. There are lots of asteroids in the solar system. Most of them live in the main asteroid belt, a region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.  Some asteroids are found in the orbital path of planets. Earth and a few other planets have asteroids like this.

NASA’s Kepler Mission found more than 2,600 exoplanets during its 9-year mission.

The solar-powered Hubble Space Telescope was launched by Space Shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990 and remains in operation, circling the Earth 15 times per day at a speed of 17,500 mph and an altitude of about 350 miles. The size of a large school bus, Hubble has taken over a million observations of objects such as planets, stars and galaxies more than 13.4 billion light years away or 80 trillion miles.

Space missions further scientific discovery, expanding technology and helping us understand the history of our planet and its place in the universe.  

The International Space Station is the third brightest object in the sky and visible to the naked eye, looking like a fast-moving plane only much higher and traveling thousands of miles an hour.

A full NASA spacesuit costs $12 million, with around 70 percent of the cost related to the life support backpack.

Spaceguard is a term that represents efforts to discover, catalog, and study near-Earth objects(NEO), especially those that may impact Earth. Methods are assessed for asteroid impact avoidance so that NEO’s can be diverted or destroyed.