On March 19th, the Moon will be the closest it has been to Earth in 18 years.



The moon - stalking the Earth since 4.4 billion BC. Picture courtesy NASA

In fact, the Moon will only be 221,556 miles away! This event, called a lunar perigee, is a source of contention between scientists and astrological theorists. Some believe that having the Moon so close can cause all sorts of natural disasters, such as the 1938 New England hurricane, Cyclone Tracy in 1974, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 - all events which fell on or near the appearance of a “SuperMoon.”

The 3rd astronaut on Apollo 11 never got to walk on the moon.

 

Michael Collins, command module pilot of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission.



While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin received the honors of being the first and second man to walk on the moon, their other crew member had to wait in the ship! This man, Michael Collins, may have had the toughest assignment of all! Collins had to wait behind in the mothership all alone while Armstrong and Aldrin explored the lunar surface. While the other two were down below, Collins also passed behind on the dark side of the moon (the furthest distance any human has been from Earth!) - and out of radio communication for quite some time. If something had gone wrong with the lunar lander’s engine, Buzz and Neil could have easily been stranded to die on the surface of the moon.

This would have meant that Collins would have had to pilot the ship back to Earth by himself! He also believed that such a tragedy would have left him a “marked” man for life, since he would have returned as the lone survivor. Fortunately, the Apollo 11 mission was a success and President Richard Nixon did not have to read the speech he had prepared in case of a tragedy!

While he may end up getting less recognition in the history books, the legendary airman Charles Lindburgh wrote to Collins telling him that his mission had "greater profundity ... you have experienced an aloneness unknown to man before".

Source: Guardian, UK

Every year, a rumor goes around the internet that some time in August will be a once in a lifetime opportunity to see Mars, because it will look as bi

Why do we see this rumor every year, often in the same time of the year?

August 27, 2003 was when Mars was the closest to our planet that it has ever been in over 50,000 years (35 million miles away, about 144 times as far away as the mooon).

At that time, Mars appeared to be 6 times larger than it normally does. At the time it was an exciting event, as long as you had a telescope. To the naked eye, Mars was still just a tiny dot in the sky.

At the time, chain emails went around that overstated the event, claiming that Mars would be within only a few miles of us, that it would be next to the moon, or that it would look like we had two moons in the sky. These emails still show up every year, even though the event happened almost 7 years ago.

In the 1950s, the United States planned to drop a nuclear bomb on the moon

At the time, the US was lagging behind the Soviet Union in the space race (For example, they sent a man into space before the US did.) Exploding a nuclear weapon on the moon was a way to one-up the Soviet Union. They planned on nuking the moon as a PR stunt, and they wanted to make sure the explosion could be seen from Earth!

This was part of a top-secret Air Force project, "Project A119" which was called "A Study of Lunar Research Flights". Details of the 1958 plan were made public in 2000 by Dr. Leonard Reiffel, the physicist who ran the project. He had worked on the project with famous astronomer Carl Sagan.
Sagan may have also disclosed some of this top-secret information when he applied for the prestigious Miller Institute graduate fellowship to Berkeley. At the time, Sagan thought that a nuclear explosion could reveal whether there was life on the moon.
The explosion likely would have ruined the face of the "man on the moon". Thankfully, years later they decided to send Neil Armstrong to the moon, and not a nuclear bomb.