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    17 Facts About Space They Should've Taught You In School

    If you cry in space, the tears just stick to your face.

    1. The International Space Station is about the size of a football field.

    2. The Hubble Space Telescope observed a tiny patch of sky for 11.6 days and found about 10,000 galaxies.

    3. The Hubble has traveled more than 3 billion miles in its orbit around Earth.

    4. The sun rises in the west and sets in the east on Venus.

    5. Snoopy, the Peanuts character, is NASA astronauts' safety mascot.

    NASA chose the pup to act as a "watchdog" for flight safety back in the 1960s. Less than 1% of the workforce receives the recognition annually, making it one of the most prized (and cutest) awards in the field.

    6. Other planets have rings, too, but Saturn's are the only ones visible from Earth.

    7. Speaking of Saturn, its rings aren't solid: They're made of ice and rock particles.

    8. Bennu, the potentially hazardous asteroid that NASA plans to land on and take a sample from, was named by a 9-year-old student.

    Third-grader Michael Puzio thought the spacecraft OSIRIS-REx (left) looks like the Egyptian god Bennu (right), which is usually depicted as a grey heron and whose name means "the ascending one" or "to shine."

    NASA says Bennu might be headed toward Earth in 2182. OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to depart in two years, hang out with Bennu in 2018, and return a sample of the asteroid to Earth in 2023 to allow scientists to examine its contents and use that info to better track celestial objects.

    9. There's a 3.3-inch aluminum sculpture on the moon commemorating fallen astronauts.

    10. Oh, and a day on Venus is longer than its year.

    11. If you cry in space, the tears just stick to your face.

    12. The dark plains on the moon are called maria.

    13. A mineral found at the moon was named armalcolite for the Apollo 11 crew.

    14. There's no permanent dark side of the moon.

    15. Jupiter has more than 50 moons, and its biggest moon, Ganymede, is bigger than Mercury or Pluto.

    Ganymede (left) is the largest moon in the solar system. It is one of the Galilean satellites, four huge moons of Jupiter that were first seen in 1610 by Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. Jupiter's honkers (right) are, from top to bottom, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

    16. Dung beetles use the Milky Way to navigate.

    17. Our sun is just one of at least 100,000,000,000 stars in the Milky Way galaxy.