NASA Quiz: 10 Amazing Space Questions

NASA footage of the historic Apollo 11 landing on the moon in 1969, with footage of the 1981 launch countdown of the Columbia space shuttle, and the MTV flag, were the first images to appear on MTV when it launched, on Aug 1, 1981. The moon landing images were shown right before airing the then music station’s first music video – the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.”

MTV Moon Person visits NASA

On Sunday, Aug 1, 2021, MTV celebrated its 40th anniversary by revealing a large-scale “Moon Person” during a ceremony at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. In an interview with The Associated Press, MTV Entertainment President and CEO Chris McCarthy said space travel imagery fits well with its young audience’s spirit.

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.

Safe journey, Perseverance!

The Ingenuity helicopter, which landed on Mars with Perseverance on Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021, is the first helicopter ever sent to another planet.

Utopia Planitia (loosely, the plain of paradise) is the largest recognized impact basin on Mars, with an estimated diameter of 3300 km – The Martian region where the Viking 2 lander touched down and began exploring on Sept. 3, 1976.

What’s new?

The Chinese Zhurong rover touched on Utopia Planitia on May 14, 2021, as a part of the Tianwen-1 mission. Its height is about 1.85 m (6.1 ft), and it has a mass of about 240 kg (530 lb). After the rover deployment, the orbiter would serve as a telecommunications relay for the rover while conducting its orbital observations of Mars.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The James Webb Space Telescope captured the first clear view of Neptune’s rings in over 30 years. The image of the ice giant, 30 times farther away from the Sun than Earth, was released on Sept. 21, 2022.