funfact.wiki
AboutGuidelinesTermsPrivacyContact

Content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

NASA's AD-1 was an oblique wing aircraft — one wing point... | funfact.wiki | funfact.wiki
NASA's AD-1 was an oblique wing aircraft — one wing pointing forward, the other backward. At supersonic speeds, swept wings reduce drag, but sweeping both shifts the center of lift. The oblique wing solved this by rotating both wings on a single pivot.
  • NASA
  • Airplane
  • Oblique wing
  • Supersonic
  • Aviation
0
DiscussionHistory

Related Cards

An airplane doesn't turn by steering left or right like a car. With no friction in the air, that would cause it to drift sideways. Instead, it banks its body to redirect lift, and the horizontal component acts as centripetal force to make the turn.
  • Airplane
  • Physics
0
The supermassive black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster sends sound waves through surrounding hot gas. Each oscillation takes about ten million years, far below human hearing. In 2022, NASA pitched it up about 57 octaves and released it as the viral 'sound of the universe.'
  • Black Hole
  • NASA
  • Space
  • Sound
  • Astronomy
0
There are more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way. A 2015 Nature study estimated about 3 trillion trees, while NASA counts 100 to 400 billion stars—over seven times more trees. The same study found Earth's trees have dropped about 46% since civilization began.
  • Tree
  • Earth
  • star
  • Milky Way
  • NASA
0
Moon dust is razor-sharp. Earth's sand is worn smooth by water and wind, but lunar dust has never been weathered, leaving it jagged like broken glass. Apollo astronauts' suits were visibly abraded within days. Dust control is now a key engineering challenge for Artemis.
  • Moon
  • Dust
  • Astronaut
  • Artemis
  • Space
  • NASA
0
The distress signal "Mayday" comes from the French "M'aidez" (help me). In 1921, radio officer Frederick Mockford at London's Croydon Airport proposed it for aviation communication with Paris, as both English and French speakers could understand it.
  • Distress signal
  • French
  • Aviation
  • Etymology
  • Mondegreen
0