We all have countless little facts squirreled away in our brains, picked up from books, shows, star parties, and more.
What’s your favorite astronomy fact that you’ve learned? What’s that tidbit that you always pull out at star parties or when trying to explain to friends just how amazing our universe is?
Whether it’s that our Moon is moving away from Earth about 1.5 inches ever year, that we can use specific types of variable stars and explosions to very accurately measure vast distances, or that the universe is 13.8 billion years old but 93 billion light-years across, what is your favorite astro-fact to share? Let’s all learn something new!
When I worked for the Pioneer program my boss was getting ready to visit the tracking station in Australia, and he asked me to come up with some interesting facts for them. I calculated that all the energy that the DSN collected from over 20 years of tracking Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 was about the same as a snowflake hitting the ground. These spacecraft had 8 watt transmitters. That is about the same as a flashlight bulb or a Christmas tree bulb, and we were detecting that from several billion miles. The signal strength when Pioneer 10 was canceled was about -180 dB. The tracking stations at the time were using a 70 meter dish antenna.
We will see a waning moon, and then, … We miss you moon!
