Interesting Facts

According to the Royal Mail in the UK, a letter to Mars would require 18,416 first-class stamps. (Royal Mail contacted NASA after 5-year-old Oliver Giddings asked the Royal Mail how much it would cost to post a letter to the red planet. The answer came back with a cost of £11,602.25  US$18,003.40. Of course Royal Mail then added the £2.25 (US$3.40) to send the letter from Britain to NASA in Florida.)

A new space company called Golden Spike is planning to offer private trips to the moon before 2020. (The company is run by former Nasa bosses and will use rocket technology that has already been developed. The cost?  A cool £871million!) Source SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration

The Kepler space telescope has confirmed its first-ever planet in a habitable zone outside our solar system. ( Spinning around its (sun like) star about 600 light years away, Kepler-22b is 2.4 times the size of the Earth, putting it in a class known as "super-Earths", and has a year of 290 days.   The near-surface temperature is presumed to be about 22 degrees Celsius, but don't pack your bags just yet, as scientists do not know whether the planet is rocky, gaseous or liquid, so you wouldn't know what to pack - diving gear, climbing gear or breathing apparatus. Kepler is NASA's first mission in search of Earth-like planets orbiting suns similar to ours, and cost the US space agency about $US600 million, but it has already uncovered 1,094 more potential planets.   They aren't the only ones looking of course, French astronomers this year confirmed the first rocky exoplanet to meet key requirements for sustaining life.  To infinity and beyond!  Co...

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, Nasa researchers in the USA have discovered that the Universe will probably continue to expand forever. (They calculated that the amount of dark energy present in space means the Universe will probably never stop expanding. A bit like my waistline.) Source: Daily Mail

According to Nasa the real colour of outer space is beige. (They have even come up with a name for the particular shade "cosmic latte". Coming to a paint shop near you.) Here's a picture of the colour.

According to NASA, around 6,000 satellites have been sent into space since the Soviet Union launched the first man-made orbiter, Sputnik 1, in 1957. (Only 3,000 of them remain in operation. So if anyone has a rag and bone spacecraft, there's a killing to be made up there. There's brass in muck tha knows.)