Space Travel and NASA Blog Post 2 Quarter 3

The manned space exploration program began with the Space Race. The Russians sent the first man, Yuri Gagarin, into space in 1961, and made one orbit around the Earth. A month later, Alan Shepard became the first American in space. After this, President Kennedy announced that the United States had the new goal of landing a man on the man by the decade's end. Following this announcement, a set of missions were sent into Earth's orbit to research and see the conditions astronauts would be in to prepare them for going to the moon.

The next set of nine missions were the Gemini missions. These missions focused on space walks or EVA's. Unfortunately, the Russian's were the first to have a space walk. The United States completed their first space walk on June 3, 1965. Later on in the Gemini missions, they practiced docking on something in space, as well as EVA's that lasted several hours.

The next missions were the Apollo ones. After the Apollo 1 crew was killed in a training fire, the space crafts were made much more safe. These missions went to the moon and circled it in orbit, tested a lunar module in Earth's orbit, and eventually landed on the moon. The other missions following these were again to the moon to collect samples and data, and then to launch the Hubble Telescope and create the International Space Station. There were also some tragedies among these missions: Columbia and Challenger, which exploded during reentry and exit respectively.

3rd Quarter Project

For this quarter, my project is about Io. Io is the closest major moon to Jupiter. It is a bit bigger than the Earth's moon, and just like our moon, one side always faces the planet. In my project, I will be talking about the composition and structure of the planet, as well as other basic facts about it, such as mass and volume, but compared to our moon, as just listing large numbers doesn't have any type of scale to it for reference. After this, I am going to show how these characteristics give Io some phenomenons that make the moon incredibly unique.

For example, Io is incredibly volcanic and has a constantly moving crust because of gravity creating tides out of the rock, partly because of its position and composition, and it constantly recycles its surface. The moon also produces an electrical field because it cuts through Jupiter's magnetic field, producing thousands of volts of electricity which creates lightning in the upper atmosphere of Jupiter. Also because of this magnetic field, sediment from Io is stripped off, creating a sphere of radiation called a plasma torus.

Less importantly, I'm also going to talk about how Io was discovered by Galileo and how it's name got changed from a number to a Greek mythology story, and what the story was.


Here is a picture of Io, showing it's unique look because of it's composition.