Going in to Space

What is space? The earth is surrounded by air. The place beyond this layer of air is called space. All heavenly bodies like the moon, the moon planets and the stars have the power to attract objects towards themselves. A heavy star or a planet has a greeter force of attraction. So also our planet earth, the force of attraction or pull of the earth is called the Earth’s Force of Gravity. It is because of this force that a stone thrown up in the air always falls back to the earth. The earth’s gravitational force is six times more powerful than the gravitational force of the moon. That is why it is not easy to get out of the earth’s pull and escape into space. We need special machines which have the power and speed to take us away from the earth’s gravitational force. These are space Rockets which are used to put spacecrafts into space.

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Moon on the moon

It was one such spacecraft that took the first man to the moon in 1969. This machine was called Apollo 11 and the first human being who stepped on the surface of the moon was Neil Armstrong. The first words he uttered on landing on the moon were, `that’s one small step for man, but a giant leap for mankind’. Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins also traveled in the spacecraft with Neil Armstrong.

Life on the moon

The real moon is very different from the moon we have known in stories and poems. There is no air and water on the moon. There is no life on the moon as there are no plants and animals. The moon’s surface has huge potholes called Craters. Since the gravitational pull of the moon isles than that of the earth, your weight on the moon will be 1/6th your weight on earth. If Neil Armstrong weighted 60 kg on the earth, he would have weighted only 10 kg on the moon. 

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Indian Astronomers

Astronomers are people who study stars. About 1500 years ago there lived an astronomer in our country. His name was Aryabhatta. He studied and taught astronomy and mathematics. He was the first man to tell us that the earth is round and that it rotates on its own axis. He also told us that the moon is dark and shines when sunlight falls on it. Varahamihira was another astronomer who lived during the times of Aryabhatta. He was a scholar and wrote many books Bhaskara discovered a method of finding out the motion of planets. He lived about 900 years.

The earth is 150 million km away from the sun. It is one of nine planets that around the sun. There are nine planets. The sun and these nine plants together form the solar system. When sunlight falls upon them, it gets reflected. This makes them shine. To us the earth seems to be very big. But compared to the sun and other stars it is very small. More than one million globes of the earth could fit insides the sun!