Test your space knowledge!
Each picture contains a description with a question.
Click on the image for a bigger picture.
Answers are at the bottom of the page
or hold your mouse over the picture and it will appear.
1. This Astronaut, on the first lunar landing mission,
poses for a photograph beside the deployed United States
flag during an Apollo 11 Extravehicular Activity (EVA) on the lunar surface.
Do you know which Astronaut this is?
2. These eerie, dark pillar-like structures are
columns of cool interstellar hydrogen gas
and dust that are also incubators for new stars.
The pillars protrude from the interior wall of a dark
molecular cloud like stalagmites from the floor of a cavern.
They are part of the what?, a nearby star-forming
region 7,000 light-years away in the constellation Serpens.
3. What?s the name of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module (LM)?
4. This telescope orbits 600 kilometers (375 miles) above
Earth, working around the clock to unlock the secrets
of the Universe. What?s the name of this telescope?
5. This shows a thin coating of water ice on the rocks
and soil of what planet? The time of the frost appearance
corresponds almost exactly with the build up of frost
one Martian year (23 Earth Months) ago.
6. The Great Red Spot is an anti-cyclonic (high- pressure) storm
on which planet? that can be likened to the worst hurricanes on Earth.
7. This stellar swarm is M80 (NGC 6093), one of the densest
of the 147 known globular star clusters in which galaxy?
Located about 28,000 light-years from Earth, M80
contains hundreds of thousands of stars, all held together
by their mutual gravitational attraction. Globular clusters are
particularly useful for studying stellar evolution, since all of the
stars in the cluster have the same age (about 15 billion years),
but cover a range of stellar masses. Every star visible in this
image is either more highly evolved than, or in a few rare
cases more massive than, our own Sun. Especially obvious
are the bright red giants, which are stars similar to the Sun
in mass that are nearing the ends of their lives.
8. The Field Integrated Design and Operations rover
is being used in ongoing NASA field tests to simulate
driving conditions on Mars. Can you guess the rover?s name?
9. Astronaut Eugene A. Cernan, Apollo 17 mission
commander, makes a short checkout of the Lunar Roving
Vehicle during the early part of the first Apollo 17
extravehicular activity (EVA-1) at the Taurus-Littrow
landing site. What planet is he on?
10. This fleet of spacecraft launched in the mid-sixties
provided for the first time live television transmissions
of the Moon from lunar orbit. Do you know the name of the spacecraft?
A11. A stunning full-color image of the entire dusty
spiral galaxy, NGC 4414. This picture shows that
the central regions of this galaxy, as is typical
of most spirals, contain primarily older, yellow and
red stars. The outer spiral arms are considerably
bluer due to ongoing formation of young, blue stars,
the brightest of which can be seen individually at
the high resolution provided by the Hubble camera.
The arms are also very rich in clouds of interstellar
dust, seen as dark patches and streaks silhouetted against the starlight.
ANSWERS