Geek: It’s not an exaggeration to say that this question, made in advance as “Why won’t astronauts get radiation poisoning?” almost shut down the manned space program. Of course, the delay would only have lasted a few years before Cold War-era competitiveness drove the effort on again, but the prospect of losing an American in space was daunting enough to give even this hype-machine pause.
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Images show surprise changes to the spacecraft as it interacted with the atmosphere.
