Space Exploration: From Galileo Galilei to Neil deGrasse Tyson
skies the exploring Do you ever pretend your bike is a rocket booster as you ride it it up a ramp and fly through the air Have you ever floated in a pool imagining what it’s like for a astronauts in zero gravity You’re not alone People have dreamed of space exploration since ancient times Prehistoric cultures carved the sky’s patterns onto bones and stones Many ancient cultures used religion to explain the wonders in the sky This included ancient Greeks Egyptians Mayans and Chinese In the 1700s and 1800s scientific tools helped people learn more about space In the 1900s m
scientists built spacecraft bound for actual space travel Later that century the first humans traveled into space From the earliest space researchers to today’s daring explorers humankind has learned a lot about our galaxy and beyond And today’s technology is allowing us to gain new information faster than ever The story of space exploration begins and continues with the people who study investigate and experience it The Milky Way is the galaxy that holds our solar system
1 Chapter Star Gazing Astronomy in some form dates back to the beginning of human history Early evidence of this includes bones carved with the moon phases These bones are thought to be from 30,000 BCE Many ancient cultures also tracked the cycles of the moon and other celestial objects Some cultures converted these cycles into calendars tracking the passage of time Historians believe the Mesopotamians began using a lunar calendar sometime between 3000 and 2000 BCE Ancient Mayans who lived between 1800 BCE and 250 CE also used astronomy to create calendars By 550 BCE ancient Greeks created drawings and models of how they thought the universe looked In these artworks the sun and a thin rim of stars spun around Earth The universe was unchanging meaning no new celestial bodies ever formed Religion influenced this idea The Greeks believed the god or gods who made the universe would not make anything imperfect Greek models of the universe became the standard for many centuries
In 1543 CE Nicolaus Copernicus challenged common beliefs about space Copernicus was a Polish astronomer He studied the work of astronomers who came before him From these studies Copernicus determined that Earth and the other planets moved around the sun People rejected this idea and ridiculed Copernicus It was not until several decades later that another astronomer made discoveries to help support Copernicus’s idea Copernicus believed a planet’s distance from the sun affected the size of its orbit around the sun
