1. The moon is very hot (224 degrees Fahrenheit, average) during the day but very cold (-243 degrees average) at night.
2. Venus spins clockwise. It’s the only planet that does!
3. One teaspoon of a neutron star would weigh six-billion tons.
4. Sally Ride was the first American woman to fly in space, on June 18, 1983.
5. One million Earths could fit inside the sun!
6. Even in an airplane, a trip to Pluto would take about 800 years.
7. Ham the Astrochimp was the first hominid in space, launched on Jan. 31, 1961.
8. Neptune’s days are 16 hours long.
9. It takes eight minutes and 19 seconds for light to travel from the sun to Earth.
10. The footprints on the moon will be there for 100 million years.
11. A neutron star can spin 600 times in one second.
12. Jupiter is the fastest spinning planet in the solar system (it only takes about 10 hours to complete a full rotation on its axis).
13. Sound does not carry in space.
14. The Earth's core is as hot as the surface of the son.
15. The very first animals in space were fruit flies...they were sent up in 1947 and recovered alive.
16. In 2011, ten-year-old Kathryn Aurora Gray discovered a supernova (a star that has run out of energy, explodes and then collapses before it dies) that no one else had seen before.
17. Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, has saltwater geyers that are 20x taller than Mt. Everest.
18. Saturn's rings are made from trillions of chunks of orbiting ice.
19. Alpha Centauri isn't a star, but a star system. It is 4.22 light years away.
20. One day on Venus is almost 8 months on Earth.
21. Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a storm that has been raging for over 200 years.