Space Pioneers & Discoveries
This Soviet satellite, launched in 1957, was the first artificial object to orbit Earth.
What is Sputnik 1?
This icy space object has a glowing tail when it gets close to the Sun.
What is a comet?
This planet rotates on its side, with its axis tilted more than 90 degrees.
What is Uranus?
This term describes a planet outside of our Solar System.
What is an exoplanet?
This planet experiences the most extreme temperature difference between day and night.
What is Mercury?
This woman helped compute trajectories for NASA missions and was featured in the film Hidden Figures.
Who is Katherine Johnson?
These bright, colorful lights happen near the North and South Poles.
What are auroras?
This moon of Jupiter is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System.
What is Io?
This is the time it takes for the Moon to complete one orbit relative to the stars, about 27.3 days.
What is a sidereal month?
This moon of Neptune has geysers that spew nitrogen into space.
What is Triton?
In 2021, this billionaire launched the first all-civilian orbital spaceflight aboard the Inspiration4 mission.
Who is Jared Isaacman?
This is a very bright flash in space when a big star dies.
What is a supernova?
This is the term for the boundary where the Sun's solar wind is stopped by the interstellar medium.
What is the heliopause?
This type of galaxy is characterized by a smooth, featureless shape and contains mostly older stars.
What is an elliptical galaxy?
This is the tallest mountain in the Solar System, found on Mars.
What is Olympus Mons?
This German rocket scientist played a key role in developing the Saturn V rocket used in the Apollo missions.
Who is Wernher von Braun?
This is a group of stars that makes a pattern, like Orion or the Big Dipper.
What is a constellation?
This spacecraft provided the first detailed photos of Pluto in 2015.
What is New Horizons?
This dense object, smaller than an asteroid, emits no light and is theorized to make up most of the universe’s mass.
What is dark matter?
This kind of star spins very fast and sends out radio waves
What is a pulsar?
This observatory, launched in 2021, is designed to peer into the early universe with infrared technology.
What is the James Webb Space Telescope?
This is when one object in space passes in front of another and hides it.
What is an eclipse?
This group of asteroids shares Jupiter’s orbit and is located around its Lagrange points.
What are the Trojan asteroids?
This ancient supernova was visible in daylight for weeks in the year 1054 and formed the Crab Nebula.
What is SN 1054?
This type of explosion happens when two stars crash into each other.
What is a supernova?