EXCITING SPACE FACT(S)

Nasa has revealed the new spacesuit that will be worn by astronauts on the Artemis 3 mission. This mission, scheduled to be launched in 2025, will put humans back on the moon for the first time in over 50 years.

Another moon landing is happening.
The suit is called the AxEMU, here it is:

(keep in mind this is a prototype with a black covering over it. The real suit will be white.)

To celebrate, here’s some quick moon facts:

1. the Aitken Basin is the Moons biggest crater, and one of the biggest craters in the entire solar system.

2. The moon has mountains, the tallest of which being Mount Huygens, which is about half the size of Mount Everest. However, this is not the highest point on the moon. The moon’s highest point by elevation is the Selenean Summit.

3. The moon used to have volcanoes and an atmosphere 2x bigger than the atmosphere of Mars. However, it’s volcanic activity slowly died and the atmosphere escaped into space.

4. the rocks on the moon are made partly of aluminum and oxygen.

5. the moon has polar ice caps, but not like Earth’s. Ice on the moons north and south poles can be found in dark, deep craters. In fact, Artemis 3 will likely land in one of these icy craters.

SPACE FACT

Just a few weeks ago humanity barely avoided an orbital disaster scenario that would’ve ended space exploration for centuries

Low Earth orbit is a very crowded area of space, full of satellites. Most satellites in the sky aren’t even functional anymore, and are space junk. There are tens of thousands of dead satellites up in orbit, taking up space. NASA and other space agencies track all of this space junk to make sure none of it hits their rockets or space stations.

Sometimes, two satellites collide and break apart, spraying metal shards everywhere, which stay in orbit, becoming basically bullets in space.

Imagine two satellites collide. The debris from the impact hits another satellite, which is torn apart, spraying more debris, which hits more satellites, and it’s a runaway chain reaction until all satellites are destroyed, and Earth’s orbit becomes a death zone full of metal bullets that prevent any rocket from getting up to orbit.
This runaway chain reaction is called Kessler Syndrome.
Just a few weeks ago, two satellites missed each other by a total of 6 meters (or 6.5 yards) and if they had collided, it could’ve triggered Kessler Syndrome.

If it happens, it would be bad, to say the least. GPS would stop working, so would a large amount of the Internet. Communications would break down, and the world would basically be catapulted into a pre-internet age almost instantly. We couldn’t go up and fix the problem, because if we tried to send anything up, it would be torn apart and just become more debris. It would basically be the end of the modern world as we know it.
We would have to wait hundreds and hundreds of years before we could return to space, as all the debris slowly burns up in our atmosphere.
We missed this disaster by 6 meters.
And every month, more and more satellites are launched into space, making this scenario more and more likely to occur.

Luckily, many companies are creating ways to clean up orbit, and will be testing then soon. Governments are making laws to limit the amount of space junk in the atmosphere. But we have to fix the problem soon, or we will become prisoners on our own planet.

SPACE FACT
Apophis is coming.

There is an asteroid called 99942 Apophis that’s over 1,200 feet wide, that is close to earth. If it were to hit Earth, Apophis would cause widespread destruction wherever it hit, but it’s not powerful enough to cause extinction, like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.

On Friday, April 13th, 2029, 99942 Apophis will reach its closest point to earth.
Apophis will fly closer to earth than the moon.
It will fly closer to Earth than some satellites orbit.
An incredibly close miss.
It will be easily visible in the night skies across africa, asia and europe. You’ll be able to see it without a telescope.

There is no chance Apophis will hit Earth. It’s been studies for over 20 years, and it’s orbit has been calculated exaclty. After the 2029 approach, Apohpis will swing back toward Earth in 2036, but nowhere near as close as it will be in 2029.

However, if it did hit Earth, it would likely hit at the tip of South America, around Colombia and Venezuela. The expected number of deaths would be 10 million.

Luckily, there’s no chance of this happening.

Space fact


The real, official name of the dwarf planet pluto is actually 134340 Pluto
because all non-planet objects in the solar system (asteroids, comets, dwarf planets) have numbers at the front of their name

The numbers mean something too
for example, 1 Ceres was the first dwarf planet found in the solar system, 2 Pallas was an asteroid discovered right after it, and 4 Vesta is the largest known asteroid

other cool asteroids include:
99942 Apophis (an asteroid that i will talk about in another post soon)
10199 Chariklo (a large asteroid with rings like saturn)
16 Psyche (an asteroid made of metal, estimated to be worth a total of $1,000,000,000,000,000)
1p Halley (Halley’s Comet, the “p” indicates it’s a comet and not an asteroid)
67p Churyumov-Gerasimenko (a comet that was actually landed on by a rover in a European space mission.)

space fact from Kypickle
im not gonna number them anymore

Pluto is not the only dwarf planet in the Solar System.
There are at least 5 confirmed dwarf planets. They are Ceres, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, and Pluto. Pluto is the largest in radius, but Eris is bigger in mass (meaning it’s “heavier” than pluto)

There are dozens of unconfirmed dwarf planets as well. They are objects that may be big enough to be dwarf planets, but we don’t know. These are
Orcus,
Sedna,
Quaoar,
Gonggong,
Salacia,
Charon,
Varda,
Ixion,
and 2002 MS4, which doesn’t have an official name yet.
And this is only what we know so far. There could potentially be hundreds of dwarf planets in our Solar System, and some could be bigger than Pluto.
As an example, Triton, which is a moon of Neptune, used to be the largest dwarf planet, before it was captured by Neptune’s gravity and made into a moon.


so yeah, dwarf planets are really interesting things. It’s why I don’t like the whole “pluto is still a planet” thing, because dwarf planets are just as interesting as regular planets, they’re just smaller.

update to that internet battle royale i was writing
a lot has happened

here's what I just wrote
-the yellowstone supervolcano has erupted
-the US nuked the Death Star, Moscow, and Hogwarts
-Russia responded by nuking the White House

so yeah
suggest things for me to include here: https://www.planetminecraft.com/forums/discussions/general/what-if-the-entire-internet-was-put-into-a-battle-royale-664753/



update on what i've been doing recently
so idk if anyone here was around when I was doing this but over a year ago I was talking about this book I was trying to write
well that sort of failed, I stopped liking the idea, and I took a long break

Well, now I'm back, and I'm trying to write a science fiction book
It's set sometime in the 2200s, where humanity has colonized the solar system, and there are now countries on other objects in the solar system. A war has broken out between Earth loyalists and Earth separatists
I've made some maps too

Red = Earth Loyalist
Blue = Earth separatist
other color = neutral


first map is Earth, second is Ceres, third is the Moon, and fourth is Mars

I spent a lot of time on these maps, so every single country you see has a name and a history. I can tell you exactly what they did every single year from their founding to the war

so yeah, maybe I'll update people on my progress here every once and a while

update on my last post:
THE SCHOOL UNBLOCKED ALL THE GAMES!!!

I am outraged
i was just at school playing tetris and out of nowhere EVERYTHING was blocked
and I mean EVERYTHING
they blocked every single game
tetris
cool math games
every single io
they even banned cookie clicker
genuinely there is no games left
they got every single one
(im at home now, but they even blocked planet minecraft)
kids at my school are going crazy
people are factory resetting their chromebooks, writing petitions, and people are genuinely saying we should protest

in the comments someone suggest any game and i will tell you if its blocked or not
so far the only unblocked games i can find are an obscure 2048 website, wordle, slope, and the google snake game

i propose a new reaction emoji
instead of reacting with “💀” react with “🗾”
for no reason other than itd be funny
so anytime you’d use a skull emoji use 🗾
just every time you see something goofy it’s just japan
(not meant to be political in any way this is just a random emoji that’s funny lol)

this is a website everyone should know about
https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/?date=2023-01-05
this is a website run by NASA that has daily images of Earth. When you click that link, you’ll see what Earth looks like today. You’re in that image, and so is everyone and everything you know.
And it’s daily. You can see how Earth changes every day. You can also go back and see how Earth looked years ago, and even see some solar eclipses from space.
Go check it out

kypickle’s space fact of the day: day 22
there are asteroids from other stars inside the solar system

they’re called interstellar objects, and we’ve detected quite a few of them. They are objects that were somehow ejected from their systems and were captured by the sun. The most famous of these objects is ‘Oumuamua. It came from another star, and has just recently flung past the sun and is currently flying back into interstellar space.
But i think the most interesting part about this is we actually know which star most interstellar objects come from.
It’s called Beta Pictoris, a star 63 light years away from us. Beta Pictoris is very young, only 26 million years old.
That means dinosaurs on earth were already extinct before Beta Pictoris formed.
Because it’s so young, the planets inside it (which there are two we know of) are still forming out of the disk of gas and dust that orbits the star.

Because there’s so much material, and two planets stirring it up, a lot of the material is ejected away from Beta Pictoris and toward the Sun.

so, it is possible that ‘Oumuamua and potentially millions of objects came from a star that you could go outside and see right now.

kypickles space fact of the day 21
this one isn’t a space fact it’s a biology fact but whatever

mushrooms are more similar to humans than they are to plants.

so how evolution works is everything has a common ancestor, going up to LUCA (The Last Universal Common Ancestor) which all life is descended from. All life you see today, everything from you, the trees outside, and all life you see, is a descendant of LUCA, but since earth is such a big place life diversified to fit its environment.
Things split off to form new species at different times. That’s how new species are created.

So, the common ancestor of plants and mushrooms, basically the organism that separately evolved into both over time, lived before mushrooms and animals split off.

to put this simply: green plants existed on earth as mushrooms and animals were the same thing.

So, mushrooms and humans are way closer relatives than you think. Mushrooms are more similar to people than they are to plants.

Having more fun writing the Internet Battle Royale
Since the normal rules of video games don't apply, I just wrote a Pokemon battle, but instead of the pokemon attacking each other they just go straight for the trainers
the battle lasts like three seconds its pretty funny

After taking a short break im back to writing my Internet Battle Royale.

Some recent events:

Dream has killed Peppa Pig.
Gigachad broke Nyan Cat in half.

KYPICKLES SPACE FACT OF THE DAY: DAY 20
THIS ONE IS IMPORTANT SO READ IT ALL


THE ASTEROID THAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS DIDN'T COME ALONE.

This is a very recent study that's going on. Scientists were mapping the ocean floor near Guinea (a country in Africa) and they found a crater from a meteor.

The crater is thought to be 65 million years old, the same age as the Chicxulub Crater, which is the crater that was created by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.

So, now we know of two craters from that time period. This can mean many things, but the most popular theory currently was that there was a second asteroid. It was possibly a moon of the larger asteroid, which killed the dinosaurs. This one likely struck right after the impact, sealing the dinosaur's fate.

Another piece of evidence to prove this was a second meteor and not something else is we don't know if one asteroid would be enough to kill the dinosaurs. The if the asteroid, Chicxulub, struck anywhere else on Earth, it might've not killed the dinosaurs at all. But it's because of where it struck, near the gulf of mexico, that it killed the dinosaurs. It hit near a region of large sulfur deposits, which basically poisoned the atmosphere and killed everything off. But we don't know if there was enough sulfur there to kill the dinosaurs, so a second asteroid can confirm how the dinosaurs were killed.

of course, there are some other theories to explain this crater. It could've been a fragment of the original asteroid, or a volcano that happened to erupt at the same time. We also don't know the exact age. The crater could've been made up to a million years after the first asteroid. So there's still a lot of uncertainty about this, since it's a very new study.

So yeah, there may have been two, or possibly even more, asteroids that killed the dinosaurs. We just need to do more research to confirm it.

Guys i’m naming a planet
that’s not a joke
i am actually trying to name a real planet out in the milky way
and the star it orbits
ive made some posts about name exoworlds 2022, an international competition where the public can give official names to 20 real planets people have found
(the competitions over now, names had to be submitted by december 11th)

but i submitted my names
Gadus for the planet
Nephropidae for the star

the names had to be culturally significant, so i chose names relating to Cape Cod, since i’m from new england

Gadus is another word for cod and Nephropidae is the scientific name for lobster
last time this competition was run there were over 700,000 responses so idk what my chances are

but maybe i’ll win

ShhinySilver made a comment on my last wall post about shooting Jupiter into the Sun, and it got my curious as to what would actually happen

So, I loaded up Universe sandbox and shot Jupiter into the Sun, here's what happened.

1. Mercury's orbit was significantly changed.

2. Earth's temperature rose by hundreds of degrees for a little while before cooling back down, since Jupiter hitting the Sun heated it up significantly.

3. Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede, was eaten by Jupiter, and Jupiter's other moon Europa was swallowed by the Sun. Out of Jupiter's 4 largest moons, only two, Callisto and Io, survived.

4. Callisto and Io began to orbit the sun in very chaotic orbits, both crossing the orbit of Saturn. Many of Saturn's small moons were destroyed, and some began to orbit Callisto and Io.

5. Callisto and Io entered the asteroid belt, stirring it up and most likely causing several large asteroids to hit Earth.

6. Callisto's orbit becomes more and more elliptical, until it begins crossing the orbit of Uranus. Eventually, Callisto enters the Kuiper belt, stirs some things up there, and is ejected from the solar system entirely.

7. Io's orbit stabilizes, and it becomes a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt. Earth is most likely pelted with hundreds of asteroids as Io clears its orbit.



So, Earth is destroyed by asteroids, Mercury's orbit is destablilized, and Saturn loses some moons. Not totally disastrous, but still very, very bad for humans. This, of course, is only one possibility of what would happen, and it all depends on where Jupiter and its moons are when we decide to shoot it into the Sun.