NASA Month: Top Tep Things You Didn't Know

All this month, I'm NASA! This means every weekday in March will feature a new post about NASA, and I'm hosting a giant giveaway in order to encourage people to spread the NASA love. For more information on the giveaway, check out this post.

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Top Ten Things You Didn't Know About NASA

...or maybe you did know! But I certainly didn't...here's some of the best things I've learned since researching this topic!

10. NASA is one reason why people around the world have clean water. The water filtration devices they made for astronauts revolutionized water filtration and is used by many municipalities in America, as well as developing countries around the world. (Source)

9. After retiring all the three remaining shuttles from the space shuttle program(Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavour), NASA stated that the next generation of spacecraft(codenamed Orion) won't be ready until late 2014 or early 2015 and therefore U.S astronauts have to travel with the Russians aboard their Soyuz spacecraft to visit the International Space Station. (Source)

8. Space shuttle Endeavour was built using spare parts from Discovery and Atlantis. (Source)

7. Enterprise was initially to be named Constitution, but fans of the TV show Star Trek ran a successful write-in campaign to change the name. (Source)

6. NASA holds one out of every 1,000 U.S. patents (Source)

5. The future space projects of NASA include setting up of a permanent functional base on the moon by 2024 and to land human beings on Mars by 2037. (Source)

4. The mission statement of NASA has been changed, since its inception in 1958, to include the mission for searching extraterrestrial life. The mission statement of NASA in its present form is - "To explore the Universe and search for life; To inspire the next generation of explorers, as only NASA can". (Source)

3. The Discovery shuttle not only launched Buzz Aldrin back into space (making him the oldest man to do so), but also launched the first female shuttle pilot and commander. (Source)

2. Mars rover Curiosity has a lasar gun that can zap a rock from 23 feet away to examine its chemical composition. (Source)

1. American astronaut Peggy Whitson holds the record for most spaceflight time logged by a woman. In two long-duration stays on the ISS, Whitson racked up 376 days in space. She has also spent the most time spacewalking among all female space fliers, performing six spacewalks on her ISS missions that took nearly 40 hours combined. (Source)

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This post is a part of the month-long celebration of NASA I'm hosting on my blog. In order to encourage people to celebrate NASA, I'm also hosting a giveaway!

One grand prize winner will receive all the books in the recent Breathless Reads tour, as well as ARCs of two anthologies and a signed Breathless Reads poster:

As well as swag from NASA, courtesy of Kate @ Ex Libris:

To celebrate NASA creatively: you could blog about why you like NASA, you could reach out to an astronaut for an interview, you could make space fan art, you could sing a song about NASA, you do a vlog, you make a list of all the ways NASA rocks...any of this counts! Just celebrate NASA in some awesome way, post it online, and include the link in the Rafflecopter. I even set that part of the entry open for multiple entries, so you could blog and vlog and Facebook and tumblr and Pinterest about NASA and they all count. The only requirements: post a link back to this contest, and put the full URL of the site in the Rafflecopter. Full details here.

To enter: be sure to read the full rules and terms of the contest here. Then fill out the Rafflecopter below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway