Myth - Debunk It

Will an astronaut explode if he takes off his helmet? Have you ever wondered what might happen to your body in space without a spacesuit? Is it really as dramatic as the movies make it out to be? Would you literally EXPLODE? Could you survive? The most serious dangers of exposure to outer space are a lack of oxygen and ebullism. Ebullism is the formation of bubbles in body fluids due to a reduction in ambient pressure. You’ll swell up pretty bad, perhaps even up to twice your normal size, but you won’t explode as your skin is very stretchy. Your blood will also not boil. You will, of course, be in an immense amount of pain and your blood circulation will be impeded. After around 15 seconds, your body would have used up all of the oxygen in your body and you’d lose consciousness. Some of you may be thinking “But I can hold my breath for minutes!” The situation in space is a little different than here on Earth due to the lack of outside pressure, and if you held y...

Can the Great Wall of China really be seen from space? Stretching for some 4,500 miles, the ancient Chinese fortification is the mightiest work of man. Being this long and large, it should be visible from space right?  In 1932, a "Ripley's Believe It or Not!" cartoon called it “the only one that would be visible to the human eye from the moon,” This is not true. The reality is that you can’t easily see the Great Wall with the unaided eye, even from low Earth orbit. And certainly, the Apollo astronauts couldn’t see it from the Moon, even though that urban legend has been widely circulated. First of all, it's not the only object visible (although barely discernible) from Low Earth orbit distance. Human-built structures such as highways, airports, bridges, dams, and components of the Kennedy Space Center are also visible. Now, if we consider space to mean a distance greater than the Earth’s orbit, like from the Moon, the answer for ...

Is it that difficult to fly through asteroid belts? When you think of asteroid belts, you imagine a region of rock and dust, with asteroids as far as the eye can see, where the spaceships must swerve left and right to avoid collisions. That’s true… only in movies. In reality the asteroid belt is less cluttered than often portrayed. If you were in the middle of an asteroid belt, you probably wouldn’t see any asteroids at all. If the asteroids were big enough and close enough to pose a danger to a spaceship, they would also be banging into each other, reducing themselves to tiny pieces. In fact, if you pull all the asteroids in that belt between Mars and Jupiter and weigh them, together they'd only weigh about 4% the mass of Earth's moon. During 12 missions beyond this belt — most recently NASA’s Juno mission on its way to Jupiter, nothing of significance has ever collided with a spacecraft. To conclude, there is no danger of asteroids colliding wh...

Is there Gravity in space? We all live in the Earth and are bound by its Gravitational force. The highest any one of can jump is 2 feet before we fall back. But everyone knows that space has no gravity, and we are free to jump as high as we want, except of course everyone is wrong. Space is packed with gravity. Without it there would be no solar systems or galaxies and all the objects would move in straight lines. But gravitational force decreases with increase in distance between the two objects. Every object in the universe is constantly attracting every other object in the universe. This means that, YOU are applying some amount of gravitational force (however minute) on the SUN! Don’t you feel more powerful? You may wonder how astronauts float, actually they don’t. They are constantly falling and they don’t have anything to stop them. This is known as ‘free falling’ where the astronauts get feeling of weightlessness but gravity is still acting on them and ...