26Practice of extreme isolation
Researchers are practicing for a human mission to Mars by living in the heart of Antarctica to see the effects of extreme isolation.
27. Scientists believe that if all of the ice on the polar caps of Mars were to be melted, it would cover the entire planet with water to a height of 30 meters,
28. One of Mars's moons, Phobos, appears to rise in the west and set in the east twice each Martian day (because it orbits Mars faster than Mars rotates) and it will eventually either collide with the planet or break apart to form planetary rings.
29. In 1997, 3 men from Yemen tried to sue NASA for invading Mars, claiming they had inherited it from their ancestors 3,000 years ago.
30. The asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs was powerful enough to send Earth rocks to Mars and even Europa. As a result, if we ever find life on those worlds it may actually have originated on our own planet.
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31Mapping of Alaska
Alaska has finally been mapped as precisely as Mars.
32. Astronomer Percival Lowell believed that he was the first person to observe canals on Venus, but because of a faulty adjustment of the eyepiece of his telescope, he was, in fact, looking at the blood vessels in his own eye.
33. There is a giant tornado the size of Europe, with two separate and independently-moving eyes at different altitudes, over the south pole of Venus.
34. The planet Venus is nearly identical in size to Earth. Their radius’ differ in size by only 201 miles, with Earth being the larger.
35. In 2013, India’s army watched “Chinese spy drones” violating its airspace for six months. They later found out they were actually watching Jupiter and Venus.
36USSR space program
The USSR were to first to launch a satellite into orbit, launch a man into space, launch a woman into space, the first spacewalk, put the first man-made object on the moon, made the first soft landing on the moon, the first landing on another planet, had several probes transmitting from Venus, had the first space station and the first long-duration space station. For a country that supposedly lost the space race those are a lot of firsts.
37. Venus spins on its axis so slowly (4 mph) that the average human could easily outwalk it.
38. In 2012, a sleepy Air Canada pilot mistook the planet Venus for an oncoming plane and sent his Air Canada jet into a steep dive that bounced passengers off the ceiling, injuring 16, and nearly caused a collision with a real plane flying 1,000 feet lower.
39. The Soviet Venera landings revealed that the surface of Venus is essentially basaltic in composition based on geochemical measurements and morphology of volcanic flows.
40. The Mariner 1 probe, which was meant to orbit Venus, failed because of a missing hyphen in a line of code, making it the most expensive typo in the history.
416 Russian probes
From 1975-82, Russia had six probes land on the surface of Venus, surviving temperatures of 855 °F and successfully taking photos.
42. Galileo sent two coded message to Keppler, that Saturn has rings, and that Venus has phases (circles the sun, not the earth), which Keppler incorrectly decoded as Mars has two moons and Jupiter has a big red spot. Although not what Galileo had written, both would later be proven true.
43. The first manmade aircraft to successfully land on another planet and send back data was the Soviet Venera 7 in 1970. After landing on Venus, the craft sent back only 23 minutes of weak data, presumably because it landed on its side.
44. If Ganymede wasn’t Jupiter’s moon, it would have to be considered a planet because it's larger than Mercury.
45. Two of the moons in our solar system (Ganymede & Titan) are actually larger than the planet Mercury.
46Black holes
Even if a black hole with the same mass as the sun were to replace it, Earth and the other planets would orbit the black hole as they orbit the sun now and not get sucked in.
47. 63 Earths can fit inside Uranus
48. In the last 7 years, humanity has discovered 43 potentially habitable planets.
49. If each star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, with a trillion people living on them, and each of these people has a trillion packs of cards and somehow they manage to make unique shuffles 1,000 times per second since the Big Bang, they'd only be starting to repeat shuffles now.
50. It snows metal on Venus
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RE: Fact #47 (Uranus size) – 64 if you relax