50 years ago,
Neal Armstrong took his first steps on the moon.
The Apollo 11 lunar landing was a historic event
of astronomical magnitude for all of humanity.
But it didn’t just put the U.S. ahead in the space race,
it was the catalyst for many more
ground-breaking space missions.
In the past decades, humans have managed to
photograph solar systems light-years away,
calculate the size of black holes,
and send rovers to neighboring planets and asteroids,
allowing us to understand, at a minuscule scale,
the vastness of our universe.
Now, Companies like SpaceX,
Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are pushing
the envelope even further with dreams of
creating human space colonies.
But it took many years and many missions
to get us where we are today.
You’re watching Explore Mode and today
we are diving into 5 space missions that changed and
shaped the way we see space today.
The Pillars of Creation,
The Helix Nebula,
The Tadpole Galaxy.
These are star formations light-years away,
and they are impossible to spot with the naked eye
until they were made visible
by this 29-year-old telescope.
This is the Hubble Telescope
and since its launch in 1990,
it has been coasting above Earth’s atmosphere
snapping pictures of planets, stars,
and galaxies far away.
This 43.5 feet long space-based telescope
took decades to engineer.
It orbits Earth at an altitude of about 350 miles
at 17,000 miles per hour,
completing a single orbit in roughly 95 minutes.
But how exactly does the Hubble Telescope
take these fascinating pictures?
The Hubble has two mirrors inside its body,
a concave primary mirror,
and a smaller convex secondary mirror.
Light from space enters the telescope
and reflects off of these mirrors.
The light is then interpreted by an array of instruments
aboard the telescope.
Many of these light frequencies
are invisible to the human eye.
The first photo the Hubble telescope sent back to Earth
was of a binary star called HD96755
located 1,300 light-years away.
The picture is blurry in contrast to later images
by the Hubble, but that’s because it’s a result
of the telescope’s first light test.
Meaning that this image represents the first time
the Hubble had successfully captured light in space.
Although the resulting images we see now
are bursting with color,
the actual photos the Hubble captures
don’t come back colorized.
They start off as black and white images.
The colorizing process works like this:
The Hubble takes several images of the same object
using different broad-band filters, Red, Green and Blue.
Once they are merged they can be rendered into
fully-colorized images that make sense to our eyes.
Gases in space like these are colorized
using narrowband filters that isolate the colors of
elements such as hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen.
Now, gases don’t really look like
bursts of purple, red and orange.
Scientists assign different colors to each element.
This makes it easier for the human eye to observe and
study chemical reactions in space.
The Hubble Telescope was named after this guy
Edwin Powell Hubble.
Hubble’s research helped demonstrate
that our universe is constantly expanding
and he developed a classification system for
galaxies that is still used today. END FACT
But years before The Hubble Telescope sent back
these images of our neighboring planets
there were two voyagers that set off into the darkness of
the universe in humanity's name,
literally carrying our legacy with them.
That recording is in Greek
and it’s one of 55 multilingual greetings
directed towards extraterrestrial life
that are engraved in The Golden Record.
This record not only carries human greetings,
it contains images of Earth, its animals,
and its people as well as its sounds such as
human footsteps, music, erupting volcanoes
and thunder.
It’s a time capsule of humanity.
A time capsule that travels aboard
The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft.
These two probes left Earth from Cape Canaveral
in 1977, with no intention of heading back home.
See, in the late 70s and 80s,
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were
aligned in such a way that would allow the spacecraft
to use Jupiter’s gravitational pull as a slingshot
and send them on their way to Uranus and Neptune.
This geometric alignment only happens once every 175 years.
So, they have to make the most of it.
Their main mission was to gather and send back
as much information of the four planets in
the outer solar system. And so they did.
The Voyagers were the first to send back clear images
of the gas giants.
Never before had humans seen such clear photos
of Saturns Rings,
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot,
the Rings of Uranus, and
Neptune’s Great Dark Spot.
Together, the spacecraft helped discover 3 new moons
in Jupiter,
4 new moons in Saturn,
11 new moons in Uranus,
and 6 new moons in Neptune.
It’s been over 40 years since The Voyagers left Earth
and by now they have long sailed out of our solar system
becoming the first human-made probes to enter
interstellar space.
They continue to travel billion miles away from
their home planet and continue to send back data
on the interstellar environment surrounding them
on a daily basis.
The last series of photos the Voyager 1 took
are portraits of our solar system.
These are the only existing images humankind has
of our space neighborhood and they were taken just
as Voyager 1 was approaching interstellar space.
It may seem like nothing at first glance,
but if we look closely, we can find home.
It takes 19 hours for Voyager 1’s messages
to reach NASA’s Deep Space Network,
the data from Voyager 2 takes 16 hours.
Once NASA’s collection of antennae gather signals
from these two probes
they're sent to scientists who then interpret them and
convert them into readable data.
The spacecraft are powered by radioisotope
thermoelectric generators
but many of their components have slowly shut down
one by one.
One day, these two explorers will go completely silent
but even then, should anyone find The Golden Records
attached to them,
they will speak for us and carry on our legacy.
But we don’t have to go to the ends of our solar system
to find traces of human civilization in space.
In fact, there are 6 humans orbiting above us right now.
Waking up inside the international space station.
Just 400 kilometers above Earth
orbits the International Space Station.
A home away from home for
humans studying our universe.
The ISS is a thing of science fiction,
there have been other smaller stations before it
but none quite like it.
In fact, it’s the largest single structure humans ever
put into space.
Its story starts in 1984,
when then president Ronald Reagan asked NASA to
make it a reality within just ten years.
Five other space agencies worked along NASA to bring
the ISS to life including Europe’s ESA,
Russia’s Roscosmos,
Canada’s CSA, and
Japan’s JAXA.
The result of their work was a space station/orbiting
research facility the size of a football field
— including the end zones.
Completing a full orbit around earth
about every 90 minutes,
meaning that in a single day, astronauts living inside it
see 16 sunrises and sunsets.
Retired NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson has spent
more time in space than any other American:
665 days to be exact.
During her time at NASA, she became the first
female commander of the ISS and on top of that,
she is the woman with the most spacewalks having
done 10 spacewalks that amount to
60 hours and 21 minutes in space.
The ISS had six sleeping areas, two bathrooms, a gym,
and a 360-degree view bay window that give those
aboard a breathtaking view of home.
The ISS gym has a bicycle, a treadmill,
and a weightlifting machine called ARED,
or Advanced Resistive Exercise Device.
A gym may seem like an unnecessary commodity
in space but it’s actually essential
for the astronauts’ health.
The human body is (sadly) not designed to float around
in zero-g.
Our muscles and bones need gravity in order to
not deteriorate so astronauts have a strict schedule of
2.5 hours of exercise per day,
6 days of the week in order to not suffer bone
and muscle loss.
But what do astronauts do up there?
Apart from carrying out maintenance and repairs
to the stations,
they conduct experiments in biology, biotechnology,
physical science, astronomy, meteorology,
and human health.
For example, for one experiment,
researchers aboard the ISS are cultivating plants
in space to understand the effects gravity
would have on astroculture (that’s agriculture in space).
So far 236 people from 18 countries have been to
the International Space Station, which is expected to be
funded until 2024
although many hope that can be extended until 2028.
But whether or not we are aboard a flying space
laboratory or sending probes with recordings of thunder,
humans will always find a way to know more about
our universe and connect with whatever may be out there.
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