Rocket Science 101
Due to the lack of atmospheric pressure in space, rocket nozzles are often designed with this shape to maximize efficiency.
What is a bell-shaped nozzle?
The Apollo 11 mission took place in this year.
What is 1969?
This fundamental principle states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred or transformed.
What is the law of conservation of energy?
This region and corresponding anticyclonic storm, is located in Jupiter's southern hemisphere.
What is the Great Red Spot?
This is the Ivy League school with the smallest student population.
What is Dartmouth?
The ideal rocket equation was derived and published in 1903 by this scientist:
Who is Konstantin Tsiolkovsky?
This person was the first American woman in space, flying on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983.
Who is Sally Ride?
This scientist discovered the three laws of planetary motion, which helped lay the foundation for Newton's law of gravitation.
Who is Johannes Kepler?
This planet has a massive canyon system, Valles Marineris, that stretches for about 4,000 kilometers—longer than the distance from New York to Los Angeles.
What is Mars?
Columbia’s famous statue is called Alma Mater, and this animal is hidden inside the statue's robes.
What is an owl?
Max-Q refers to the point where a spacecraft experiences the most of this kind of pressure during launch or re-entry.
What is dynamic pressure?
NASA’s Artemis program aims to land the first woman and person of color on this lunar region.
What is the lunar south pole?
This term describes the minimum velocity a spacecraft must reach to maintain a stable orbit around Earth.
What is orbital velocity?
This moon of Saturn is covered in a thick atmosphere and has lakes and rivers made of liquid methane and ethane.
What is Titan?
Students at Yale pranked Harvard students at the 2004 Harvard-Yale game by distributing "pep squad" placards which actually spelled out this insult.
What is "we suck"?
This highly toxic compound, first used as a component in rocket fuel during World War II, is commonly used as a low-power monopropellant for spacecraft-maneuvering thrusters.
What is hydrazine?
This space probe “touched” the Sun in 2021, flying through its outer atmosphere.
What is the Parker Solar Probe?
A planet orbiting close to a massive object like a black hole experiences stronger gravity on one side than the other, leading to this extreme stretching effect.
What is tidal force?
This moon of Jupiter is one of the most geologically active bodies in the Solar System, with volcanoes erupting lava made of silicate rock.
What is Io?
This Ivy League school has a building that once served as the Capitol building of the United States in 1783.
What is Princeton?
The core of the Saturn V rocket was powered by this number of F-1 engines.
What is five?
This mission, launched in 1973, was the United States' first space station.
What is Skylab?
This effect, caused by the expansion of space, stretches light from distant galaxies, shifting it toward the red end of the spectrum.
What is redshift?
This "super-Earth" exoplanet has a rocky surface and is located in the habitable zone of its star, making it a candidate for potential life.
What is Kepler-452b?
This was the name of Brown's first live bear mascot, who made her debut in 1905.
What is Helen?