Since 1966, NASA has been landing the unmanned Surveyor probes onto the surface of the moon to collect data. In December 1968, NASA managed to get a manned spacecraft into lunar orbit with the Apollo 8 mission. The next goal to accomplish was to combine these feats in order to land a crewed spaceship onto…

During the 1960s, NASA had the daunting task of landing a person on the moon. When John F. Kennedy announced the goal to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, they had only recently sent Alan Shepard into space for the first time. It would be another nine months before…

Getting to space is not a difficult task, but staying in space is an entirely different challenge. At the altitude of the International Space Station — 250 miles — a spacecraft must have a horizontal velocity of about 5 miles per second. That’s roughly 17,000 mph. As the mass of the object or vehicle being…

There’s an old story of Newton sitting underneath a tree during his studies, when an apple fell and hit him on the head, leading him to begin his adventures into solving the mysteries of gravity. While it’s doubtful that this fanciful tale actually happened, it is true that Newton had an incredibly significant impact on…

Back in the early 1960s, a fledgling NASA was presented with lots of new problems. Going to space was unlike anything humans had ever done, and engineers and scientists were constantly searching for answers to issues they had never even considered before. One of these problems was dealing with the properties of a liquid in…

In the video above, I talk about how pendulums actually work. If you haven’t watched it, the principle is simple: an object is suspended from a fixed point and allowed to swing back and forth – the mass of the object and the time it takes to swing back and forth are independent of each…

Today is Earth Day! We spend this day celebrating Earth, raising awareness of things threatening the planet, and learning how to fix those problems! This year’s theme is plastic pollution and the threat it poses to humans and other life. Plastics can be very useful, but the huge amount that is discarded incorrectly and dangerously…

Believe it or not, supernovas have been known to humans for thousands of years. That’s not to say that ancient civilizations knew exactly what was happening when they saw them, but they were witnesses to some of the most powerful events in our universe. When certain stars reach the end of their lifetime, they explode…

Daniel Bernoulli was a Swiss mathematician and physicist in the mid-1700s. He excelled in the fields of statistics and probability, but also was influential in applying mathematics to physical mechanics. Particularly, he is known for his work in fluid dynamics, now known as Bernoulli’s Principle. Most simply, Bernoulli’s Principle is a derivation of the conservation…