The Super Bowl is in Houston, which is also home to the Johnson Space Center. NASA got in on the fun of the big game with the Space Bowl, which I was fortunate to attend this week. Here are some fun facts about football and space exploration that I learned at Space Bowl.
* The crew on the International Space Station (ISS) will be watching the Super Bowl, even though it’s the middle of the night for them. (Don’t worry, they have the morning off.) During the game, they will see two sunrise and two sunsets, as they orbit the Earth at a speed of 17,5000 mph. They see 16 sunrises and sunsets every day. When I visited the Johnson Space Center as part of Space Bowl, we got to see Mission Control for the ISS, the location of the ISS was marked with a football. Can you find it in the photo above?
* The ISS is pretty much the same size as a football field, including end zones. You can see astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson wearing their jerseys for the Super Bowl and answering questions from Space Bowl participants here:
* Strength and conditioning are important training regimens for both NFL players and astronauts, especially those on the ISS who would lose bone and muscle mass if they didn’t exercise. They run on a treadmill and they use an ARED (Advanced Resistive Exercise Device) to lift weights. When he was on the ISS a few years ago, astronaut Doug Wheeler showed how the ARED works:
* The average NFL pass travels at a speed of 60 mph. If you threw a football to the moon at that speed, it would take 166 days, or 3,982 hours, to get there. The New Horizons probe made the quickest trip to the moon, whizzing past it in just 8 hours 35 minutes on its way to Pluto.
* There are some similarities between the uniforms that NFL players wear and space suits.
* The anti-glare, anti-scratch visors used on some football helmet visors were originally designed for space suits.
* NASA is currently working on building the most powerful rocket ever, the Space Launch System. It will stand 384 feet, making it 24 feet taller than a football field is long. This is a replica of it at Space Center Houston:
* Speaking of Mars, football would be a lot easier there. The red planet has both very thin atmosphere and 1/3 of the gravity that we have Earth. That means there is no aerodynamic drag on the ball. As a result, a quarterback could throw the football three times as far as he could here.
* Kickers would have it easy on Mars, too. The longest field goal kick in the NFL is 64 yards. On Mars, that same ball would have traveled 192 yards. A football on Mars would weigh less than half a pound.
* You can fit 4,625 footballs in Orion Crew Module, which is being designed to carry astronauts to deep space destinations, like Mars. With that number of footballs, teams could play 192 NFL games.
At Space Bowl, Pat Patriot was as excited as I was to check out a mock-up of Orion. He posed with two of the engineers working on Orion.
All facts courtesy of NASA.
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