Moons Orbiting facts
While investigating facts about Moons Orbiting Jupiter and Moons Orbiting Earth, I found out little known, but curios details like:
About the joke behind NASA's Juno mission. While Jupiter's moons are named after the god's many mistresses, Juno, the space probe sent to orbit and monitor Jupiter, is named after his wife.
how many moons are orbiting saturn?
Pluto is technically a binary system. Its moon, Charon, is massive enough in relation to Pluto that the point around which they orbit is somewhere in between the two.
What are the 6 moons orbiting saturn?
In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what is the number of moons orbiting mercury and venus. Here are 50 of the best facts about Moons Orbiting Saturn and Moons Orbiting Mars I managed to collect.
what is the name for the largest moons orbiting jupiter?
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In 1993, A company called "Space advertising inc." attempted to launch a giant billboard into low earth orbit. From earth the billboard would look almost as big as a full moon. After the project was canceled, a bill was introduced that banned any further space advertising.
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When the Apollo 8 astronauts were sued by an atheist activist for reading from Genesis in lunar orbit, the Supreme Court threw out the case. Their reason? "Lack of jurisdiction" in orbit around the Moon.
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Bill Anders, who achieved a Masters in nuclear engineering, logged 8,000 hours of flight time as a US Navy pilot, became 1 of the first 3 astronauts to orbit the moon, and served as Ambassador to Norway all before age 45. He then went on to become one of the most succesful CEO's of his time.
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The most isolated human being ever was Al Worden, command module pilot of Apollo 15, who in lunar orbit was at a maximum distance of 2,235 miles from his fellow astronauts on the surface. While on the other side of the Moon, no communication with Earth or his comrades was possible.
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NASA will send a probe to an asteroid, land on it, and harvest a boulder from it. Then bring it into the moon's orbit for spacewalking astronauts to collect samples.
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The moon orbits the Earth once every 27.322 days. It also takes approximately 27 days for the moon to rotate once on its axis. As a result, the moon does not seem to be spinning but appears to observers from Earth to be keeping almost perfectly still. Scientists call this synchronous rotation.
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Apollo 10 was given limited fuel for orbiting the moon to discourage the astronauts from attempting a Lunar Landing ahead of the scheduled Apollo 11.
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India's moon orbiter took photos of the Apollo landing site, debunking the conspiracy theory that the US faked the moon landings.
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Until the 17th century most scientists believed that the speed of light was infinite. It was only in 1676 that Ole Rømer and Giovanni Cassini made the first measurement of the velocity of light (just 27% off the real value) by observing the orbits of the moons of Jupiter.
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The Milky Way has several "satellite galaxies", smaller galaxies that orbit our galaxy like moons to a planet.
Moons Orbiting data charts
For your convenience take a look at Moons Orbiting figures with stats and charts presented as graphic.
Why do saturn and jupiter have more moons?
You can easily fact check why does saturn and jupiter have more moons by examining the linked well-known sources.
Triton, the largest moon of Neptune, is the only moon in our solar system with a retrograde orbit - an orbit in the opposite direction its planet, and is thus thought to be a dwarf planet that Neptune caught from the Kuiper belt.
The 3rd stage of Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket launched in 1969 is an semi-stable orbit and revisited the earth-moon system in 2003 and is expected to arrive again in 2040s - source
When Michael Collins remained in the lunar module, he was in Orbit on the "other" side of the moon. He was cut off from all radio contact, the most alone any human has ever been. - source
Fifty years ago, 5 unmanned lunar orbiters circled the moon, taking extremely high resolution photos of the surface that if you printed it would fit a billboard without losing any quality.
Earth has several other companions additional to our moon, such as Cruithne and the trojan asteroid 2010 TK7, which is about 300 meters large, and revolve the sun coupled to earth's orbit. - source
When were jupiter's moons discovered?
While Neil Armstrong was walking on the moon the Soviet Union had an unmanned spacecraft in lunar orbit on a mission to obtain soil samples. It crashed on the moon the day Apollo 11 left.
How many moons are orbiting jupiter?
Earth's only natural satellite has no other name and is simply called "the Moon" because people didn't know other moons existed until Galileo Galilei discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610.
Neso (moon of Neptune) is the farthest moon from its planet in the Solar System. It takes 26 Earth years to orbit Neptune planet once and it is as far away from the planet as the Earth is to Venus.
In 2002 an asteroid was discovered in a strange orbit around Earth. It was later found to be the third-stage booster rocket from the Apollo 12 moon landing.
About "Moon Trees", trees whose seeds have orbited the moon on Apollo 14. Many are still alive today.
Micheal Collins, one of the Apollo 11 astronauts, became the loneliest human ever when he solitarily orbited the dark side of the moon, and lost all radio contact with Earth and his fellow astronauts for 48 minutes.
Moons orbiting infographics
Beautiful visual representation of Moons Orbiting numbers and stats to get perspecive of the whole story.