I didn’t realize there was a moon-landing Bible verse until my pastor mentioned it a few weeks ago.

It seems that while returning from the historic first landing on the moon 50 years ago, astronaut Buzz Aldrin took part in a TV broadcast the night before splashing down. During the broadcast, the second man to set foot on the moon’s surface read Psalms 8:3–4: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou has ordained; What is man that thou art mindful of him? And the Son of Man, that thou visitest him?”

It turns out Aldrin’s religious faith is not an anomaly. In fact, the 29 astronauts who visited the moon during the Apollo program were a generally religious cohort. According to NASA, 23 were Protestant and six Catholic, with a high proportion of them serving as church leaders in their congregations.

The bad news is that this space rock is between 38 and 86 metres across, according to NASA — that’s about the size of three double-decker buses.

The good news is that it should swing past our home planet (Earth) with no chance of a direct hit.

It will be travelling at a mind-blowing 10.88 kilometers per second which is around 40,000 kilometres per hour.

This week:
👩‍🚀 Three space travelers prepare for an upcoming mission
🚀 8,000 pounds of cargo & research launch to our orbiting lab
📊 A call to use open data to address real-world problems

For these stories and more, watch: https://go.nasa.gov/2SkdkRw

Amazing new Mars panorama from Curiosity For 10 Years NASA Has Been Capturing Images of Mars and They Now Reveal the Planet’s Amazing Beauty.

But they’re real. And they’re spectacular.

The existence of liquid water on Mars — one of the more hotly debated matters about our cold, red neighbor — is looking increasingly likely.

New research published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy indicates that there really is a buried reservoir of super salty water near the south pole. Scientists say such a lake would significantly improve the likelihood that Mars just might harbor microscopic life of its own.

“What we have here is a potential space drive,” Laithwaite said. “Properly developed, this would take you to the outer universe on a spoonful of uranium.”

Most of the exoplanets we’ve confirmed to date have never actually been seen directly. We confirm their presence by indirect means, such as the effect they have on their host star. But now, astronomers have revealed images of an indirectly found exoplanet.

It’s not just an impressive feat of skills and technology. The combination of methods has given us a superb toolkit for measuring an exoplanet. For the first time, astronomers have measured both the brightness and the mass of an exoplanet — which has given us a new probe into how planets form.

The exoplanet is Beta Pictoris c (β Pic c), a gas giant orbiting the star — you guessed it — Beta Pictoris, just 63 light-years away. It’s a very young, very bright star, around 23 million years old; as such, it’s still surrounded by a lot of dusty debris, and its exoplanets — we’ve confirmed two to date — are just babies, around 18.5 million years old.