NASA

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.

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.'

When the Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990, its mirror was off by 2.2 micrometers due to a miscalibrated polishing device. Its blurry images became a global embarrassment. In 1993, NASA astronauts aboard a Space Shuttle installed corrective optics, and Hubble finally worked.

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.

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.

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.