Daily Knowledge

"Dreams are necessary to life."
[Anais Nin]

Quote of the Day, from brainyquote.com (2023/02/07)

Rhea Seddon (born 1947) is an American surgeon and retired astronaut for NASA. After being selected as part of the first group of NASA astronauts to include women in 1978, she flew on three Space Shuttle flights, as mission specialist on STS-51-D and STS-40, and as payload commander for STS-58, accumulating over 722 hours in space. On these flights, she built repair tools for a US Navy satellite and performed medical experiments. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, Seddon was awarded her doctor of medicine degree in 1973. During her residency with the University of Tennessee hospitals, she was the only woman in the General Surgery Residency Program. Before, during and after her career in the astronaut program, she worked in hospital emergency departments. She retired from NASA in November 1997 and became Chief Medical Officer of the Vanderbilt Medical Group. (Full article...)

Queen Elizabeth II

1820 – The first ship of the American Colonization Society departed from New York for West Africa with 88 African-American emigrants aboard to found the colony of Liberia.
1840 – British representatives and Māori chiefs first signed the Treaty of Waitangi, widely regarded to be the founding document of New Zealand.
1952 – Elizabeth II (pictured) became the queen regnant of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon upon the death of her father, King George VI.
1976 – Lockheed Corporation president Carl Kotchian admitted that the company had paid out approximately US$3 million in bribes to the office of Japanese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka.
2018 – The SpaceX launch vehicle Falcon Heavy made its maiden flight.

Age of Earth: ~ 4.568 billion years
World Population: 7.3 billion (July 2015)
Continents: 7 (Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia)
Mean Radius: 6371.0 km
Axial Tilt: 23,44°

Image Source: Wikipedia - License: Public Domain (thanks to NASA)

Our solar system consists of
1 star (Sun) and 8 planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune).

1 AU (astronomical unit) is roughly the distance between Earth and the Sun (about 150 million kilometres).
The space probe Voyager 1 was launched by the NASA in 1977 and is meanwhile (autumn 2015) about 133 AU away from Earth.

Image Source: Wikipedia - License: CC BY-SA 3.0