Sunsets are blue on Mars

The sunsets we know are typically mellow yellow or fiery pink. But if we lived on Mars, we’d witness blue sunsets, as seen in a series of images snapped by NASA’s Curiosity rover in 2015.

As Mark Lemmon, a scientist who worked on the Curiosity team, explained to Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “The colours come from the fact that the very fine dust is the right size so that blue light penetrates the atmosphere slightly more efficiently.”

The largest volcano in the solar system

Mount Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth, reaching 5.5 miles into the sky. However, you’d need to stack three Everests on top of each other in order to create something as massive as Mars’ Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system. The enormous volcano is 16 miles tall and stretches 374 miles wide — approximately the same size as the state of Arizona, according to Nasa.

Footprints on the moon

The Apollo astronauts’ footprints on the moon will probably stay there for at least 100 million years.

Since the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere, there’s no wind or water to erode or wash away the Apollo astronauts’ mark on the moon. That means their footprints, rover prints, spaceship prints and discarded materials will stay preserved on the moon for a very long time.

They won’t stay on there forever, though. The moon still has a dynamic environment. It’s actually being constantly bombarded with “micrometeorites”, which means that erosion is still happening on the moon, just very slowly.

How Pluto got its name

In 1930, the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) was struggling to come up with a name for a newly-discovered planet. It was 11-year-old Venetia Burney Phair who suggested Pluto, inspired by the god of the underworld. When the idea eventually reached the RAS with the help of the girl’s connected family, (her librarian grandfather knew many astronomers) they loved it and ultimately decided to use the suggestion.

First space hotel to open in 2027

In 2019, Californian company the Gateway Foundation released plans for a cruise ship-style hotel that could one day float above the Earth’s atmosphere. Then called the Von Braun Station, this futuristic concept — comprised of 24 modules connected by elevator shafts that make up a rotating wheel orbiting the Earth — was scheduled to be fully operational by 2027.

Fast forward a couple of years and the hotel has a new name — Voyager Station — and it’s set to be built by Orbital Assembly Corporation. For now, the space hotel isn’t advertising a room rate, but expect it to come with a pretty hefty price tag attached. The next stage in getting the Voyager Station off the ground is bringing more investors into the mix and continuing with tests on the ground.

Published in Dawn, Young World, March 20th, 2021