Moon dust is razor-sharp. Earth's sand is worn smooth by ... | funfact.wiki | funfact.wiki
Moondust 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.
In 2013, during a gameSuper Mario 64 speedrun, Mario suddenly teleported. A $1,000 bounty yielded no answers for 8 years. The cause: spaceradiation flipped a single bit in the console's memory, altering Mario's position coordinates.
NASA's AD-1 was an oblique wingaircraft — 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.
The Moon's orbit doesn't spiral around Earth as most people imagine. Because the Earth-Moon distance is tiny compared to the Earth-Sun distance, the Moon's actual path through space is nearly circular, traveling alongside Earth around the Sun.
In 1999, NASA lost a $327.6 million Mars probe to a measurement unit mix-up. Lockheed Martin sent data in pound-force seconds; NASA entered it into a newton-second program without converting. The orbiter drifted off course and burned up in Mars's atmosphere.