12/24/2023
WANA presents 5 fun holiday space facts right on time for Christmas!
Fact 1: UFO sightings increase during the holiday season, and many of them remain unidentified or unexplained.
Fact 2: It would take 2683 LED Christmas lights for your home to be visible from space! Researchers calculated this using the average luminosity of store-bought LED Christmas lights. However, this number also relies on there being no light pollution at all.
Fact 3: Santa Claus visited the ISS in 2010 and brought presents to the astronauts on board! The crew in the American section of the ISS discovered a load of presents outside each of their doors. The gifts were prepared on Earth and were launched onto the ISS with an earlier expedition to give the crew a Christmas surprise.
Fact 4: The first food baked in space was cookies for Santa! In December 2019, an experiment was led aboard the ISS to see how cooking would work in space. One of the crew members who took part, Christina Koch, tweeted that the crew had made some Christmas milk and cookies for Santa.
Fact 5: The first Christmas tree in space was made out of recycled cans! During the Christmas period of 1973, the crew constructed a Christmas tree out of empty food cans.