Outer Space Quiz: 10 Inspiring Questions on Mars and Beyond!

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s largest and most powerful space telescope, a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The $10-billion observatory rocketed from French Guiana on South America’s northeastern coast on Dec. 25, 2021. The Webb Telescope is on a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) search to find light from the first stars, galaxies, and hints of life.

Who was James Webb?

James E. Webb was the first NASA Administrator, serving from Feb. 1961 to Oct.1968.

Stephan's Quintet is a visual grouping of five galaxies best known for being featured in the classic holiday film, "It's a Wonderful Life." The Quintet was part of the first batch of images released from the James Webb Space Telescope on July 12, 2022.

What's in the picture?

With its infrared and high resolution,  the world's largest and most powerful space telescope shows sparkling clusters of millions of young stars. The image also captures tails of gas, dust, and stars being pulled from several galaxies due to gravitational interactions and the vast shock waves as one of the galaxies, NGC 7318B, smashes through the cluster.

Ganymede is a satellite of Jupiter and the largest of the Solar System's moons. It's the ninth-largest object in the Solar System and is the largest without a substantial atmosphere. That's larger than planet Mercury.

Ganymede bonus fact

On Monday, June  7, 2021, NASA's space probe Juno performed its second flyby Jupiter's Ganymede at a close distance of 1,038 kilometers (645 mi), making it the nearest to Jupiter's most giant moon in 20 years.

On Friday, May 28, 2021, Nasa has released a new picture showing billions of stars and countless black holes at the heart of our galaxy, the Milky Way. The image comprises 370 photos taken over the past two decades by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, which orbits Earth around 86,500 miles away.

You’re looking at the Seyfert galaxy NGC 3254. Seyfert galaxies have a supermassive black hole in them.

Supermassive News Fact:

The Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of the spiral galaxy NGC 3254, with its active core emitting as much energy as the rest of the galaxy combined. The bright blue light that stands out in the top center of the Hubble image, toward the outer edge of the galaxy's spiral, is a star-exploding supernova.

Jessica Watkins, 33, is the first Black woman to live and work at the International Space Station. She will join a SpaceX crew-4 mission after April 2022, marking her first flight into space.

Who was the first Black person on the International Space Station?

Victor Glover, part of SpaceX's Crew-2 mission that launched in November 2020, became the first Black astronaut to join the station crew. Others have visited the space station for a shorter period. A total of 248 people have visited the 21-year-old ISS. Seven of them have been Black.

Who were the first Black astronauts?

In 1983, Guion Bluford became the first Black astronaut to travel to space. Mae Jemison followed nine years later and became the first Black woman in space.

Who was the youngest American to launch into space?

29-year-old childhood bone-cancer survivor Hayley Arceneaux became the youngest American to travel to space on Sept. 16, 2021, after SpaceX launched the world's first all-civilian human spaceflight into Earth's orbit. She is also the first person in space with a prosthesis, a titanium rod in her left leg.

SpaceX has launched more than 1,700 low-orbiting “Starlink” satellites by the end of 2021. Josef Aschbacher, head of the European Space Agency, called for coordinated action from the EU and other countries to ensure that SpaceX’s constellation did not prevent other countries or companies from launching their satellites. SpaceX is racing against competitors to build a satellite network big enough to cover the whole globe, with permission from US authorities to launch 12,000 satellites. The company eventually plans to have a constellation of 42,000 satellites orbiting the planet.

You’re looking at a 4 km-wide crater in Mars’s north polar region of Vastitas Borealis. The crater is partially filled with water ice. The dark material on the crater rim likely consists of volcanic materials such as basalt, giving the Marsian crater its red velvety look. The image was taken Jul. 5, 2021, by the European Space Agency/Roscosmos ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter and released by the ESA on Jan. 3, 2022.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe took its first visible-light images of the surface of Venus from space in July 2020. The spacecraft collected more pictures in a later flyby, creating a video of Venus’s entire nightside. An analysis of the images and video, published on Feb. 9, 2022, in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, adds to scientists’ understanding of the planet dubbed Earth’s twin, revealing Venus’s distinctive features like continental regions, plains, and plateaus.

Solar flares are powerful bursts of energy from the Sun. According to NASA, flares and solar eruptions can impact radio communications, electric power grids, navigation signals and pose risks to spacecraft and astronauts. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the Sun constantly, captured an image of a mid-level solar flare on Jan. 20, 2022. Watch it here.