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November 1999
posted: 02:24 pm ET
30 November 1999
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facts9911- The asteroid Mathilde has craters named after coal fields, basins and mines on Earth. Among the craters' names are Similkameen, Aachen, Damodar, Ishikari, and Enugu.
- Pluto has by far the longest year of any planet in our solar system, taking 248 Earth years to orbit the sun.
- A crater on Venus, Mumtaz-Mahal, is named after the Mogul empress for whom the Taj Mahal was built.
- Underwriters at the British insurance market Lloyd's of London have insured individuals against death or injury caused by a piece of disintegrating satellite falling from the sky.
- Italian-French astronomer Gian Domenico Cassini (1625-1712) discovered four of Saturn's moons (Iapetus, Rhea, Tethys, and Dione), as well as a gap in the planet's rings. The Cassini spacecraft, now en route to Saturn, is named after him.
- The space shuttle Columbia was named after a sloop captained by Robert Gray. In May 1792, Gray maneuvered the ship through perilous inland waters to explore the Pacific Northwest.
- The two Voyager spacecraft, now heading toward interstellar space, carry records containing various musical selections, including Chuck Berry's song "Johnny B. Goode."
In ancient Roman mythology, Diana was the goddess of the moon. She also was associated with wild animals and the hunt.
- On November 17, 1970, a Soviet rover called Lunokhod 1 analyzed soil samples on the moon.
- In late 1989, several months before its launch, the Hubble Space Telescope was flown to Kennedy Space Center in a classified container called "the casket" that was normally used to transport spy satellites. (Source: "The Hubble Wars," by Eric J. Chaisson)
- The space shuttle Endeavour was named for a ship captained by British explorer James Cook in the late 18th Century. Cook's crew ate a diet rich in vitamin C, and thus didn't suffer the disease scurvy, previously common in long sea voyages.
- In ancient Roman mythology, Diana was the goddess of the moon. She also was associated with wild animals and the hunt.
- Among the names given to rocks in the vicinity of the Sojourner rover on Mars were: Gumby, Contour, Lamb, Asterix, Ratbert, Kitten, Duck, Iguana, Anthill, Nibbles, and Ender.
- The first U.S. space shuttle was given the name 'Enterprise" in response to a write-in campaign by 'Star Trek' fans. The shuttle was originally going to be named 'Constitution.'
- The space shuttle Atlantis was named after a research vessel used by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute from 1930 to 1966
- The martian moons Phobos and Deimos derive their names, respectively, from the Greek words for "fear" and "terror."
- During a spacewalk, an astronaut's spacesuit is pressurized to 4.3 pounds per square inch, less than a third of the air pressure experienced at sea level on Earth.
- The 'Chunqui,' an ancient Chinese compendium of astronomical records, contains the earliest known mention of a solar eclipse (709 B.C.).
- In the cable TV series 'Stargate SG-1,' a team of explorers encounters various peoples -- Vikings, Greeks, Arabs -- who were abducted from Earth and scattered around the galaxy. The series is fictitious.
- Jahangir, the fourth Mogul ruler of India, ordered that knives and swords be forged from an iron meteorite that landed in his realm in 1621.
- Mars and Mercury each have surface gravity approximately 0.38 that of the Earth.
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