Myths about NASA

In the work of any organization, over time, many myths and misunderstandings can accumulate. Not spared from this is the US space agency NASA. Here are four of the most annoying authors of delusion.

168 errors in the movie "Armageddon"

The 1998 American non-science fiction film tells of the impending death of all life on Earth due to a collision with an asteroid and the desperate attempts of mankind to stop or destroy this celestial body. There are a lot of mistakes in the film, and many are connected with space and space flight. Therefore, NASA uses the film to train new employees. There were a total of 168 errors, future managers are invited to watch the movie and find as many as possible.

This bike is distributed not only by " Wikipedia ", entertainment resources and various sites about cinema, but also news publications . The source of the myth is an article in the magazine NewScientist on September 1, 2007. At the same time, the stated fact has no official confirmation even in the original source. Who came up with the number 168, remains a mystery.

In fact, this is only a myth . One day while starting a lesson at NASA, someone showed a small excerpt from Armageddon and asked what was wrong with it. This was done in order to somehow involve the listeners - without reinforcement, brain activity drops to half asleep within ten minutes after the start of the lecture. The damaged phone brought the fragment demonstration to regular screenings of the full film as not even a way to manipulate attention, but as an official managerial training exercise. The showing of the whole film requires permission from the copyright holders, and the studio can request payment. NASA does not have the financial ability to spend money on such nonsense.
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In addition, it is a very old myth. Previously, during excursions, children could be said as a joke that the only right thing in Armageddon was chairs at workplaces. Today's teens will not understand what kind of film in question.

The rover "Curiosity" is programmed to perform Happy Birthday

On the Web, this fact is distributed in the form of a quote like “If you ever feel lonely, remember that the Curiosity rover is programmed to sing to itself“ Happy Birthday ”every year.” Like most entertainment content in modern RuNet, this is a translation from English.



This immediately leads to the question: where is the "Curiosity" loudspeaker? And why would someone install it on a device for sending it to another planet, to which the sound barely spreads? Will the tone of the sound in the atmosphere of Mars, dominated by carbon dioxide? The atmosphere of the red planet on the density is less than a percent of the earth, so to hear the sound will be almost impossible . However, there is no one to listen to the noise - even at the very "Curiosity" there is no microphone.


For convenience, the NASA video does not mention that the human ear would hardly hear the sound being played, and that there is no one to listen to the vibrations. A sample of the lost is heard at 1:20.

The roots of delusions grow from what was really done in August 2013. The first anniversary of being on Mars had to be somehow celebrated, or rather, it was a work on public relations. And she was extremely successful - the robot, which is completely alone on another planet and plays a melody to itself, caused great sympathy. This is important for the government department, which has to fight for every dollar of funding.

The resonator, which works with samples of the studied rock, was made to function in such a way that the vibrations coincided with the melody of the song Happy Birthday to You. As a rule, the tones of the resonator are usually indistinguishable. In 2013, the teams were specially sent from Earth, the rover is not programmed to repeat this action on certain dates in the future. Data on the repetition of this action on August 5, 2014 are not available.

NASA Inventions

NASA and its divisions have many achievements of their own for humanity, but some of the developments of American industry are unfairly attributed to an aerospace agency. So that the flow of budget money does not dry up, the agency takes almost no active attempts to stop the spread of these myths.

Title of invention	Common opinion about authorship	Reality
Space knob	NASA has spent billion on developing a pen that can write in microgravity. Soviet / Russian cosmonauts used ordinary pencil.	Conductive graphite crumb ordinary pencil settles on the electronics and enters the respiratory tract. In space, the cosmic pen was treated with wax crayons and felt-tip pens. The handle was developed by a private company of Paul Fisher completely independently, without any order from NASA. Only a million dollars was spent on development. The use is also made of astronauts, and anyone can afford to buy one.
Teflon	Designed for the Apollo program as thermal insulation.	Accidentally singled out in 1938 by Roy Plunkett, a researcher at Kinetic Chemicals, who later became a division of DuPont.
Integrated Circuits and Computers	Created by NASA for the lunar program.	As in the case of other inventions of such complexity, a breakthrough was provided by several people and organizations . For the first time microchips were created ten years before the landing of a man on the moon. But it was NASA who first used integrated circuits for the Apollo on-board computer .
Tang	Instant fruit drink for astronauts, specially created for manned flights.	Created in 1957 by General Foods Corporation almost a year before the formation of NASA.
Velcro Velcro	Fasteners, created for the space program.	Created by the Swiss Georges de Mestral in 1941.
Quartz watches, barcodes, smoke detectors, cordless power tools	Developed by NASA for the space program.	NASA used special upgraded versions of these products in its missions, but the original inventions do not belong to the agency.

NASA will find aliens in 2025

The recent news triggered by the statement of Ellen Stofan. “ I’m sure that we will be able to detect signs of the existence of extraterrestrial life in the next ten years, and convincing evidence at 20.” Some publications even confused the floor of the speaker.



Also, Stofan did not say anything about finding extraterrestrial civilizations or life in general - it was about finding signs of the simplest microscopic life.

“I believe that in a decade we will receive strong signs of life outside the Earth, and I believe that in 20-30 years we will receive accurate evidence. We know where to look, we know what to look for, in most cases we have technologies, and we are on our way to using them. ”

“We are not talking about little green men. We are talking about small germs. ”

The certainty of such statements is caused by several facts: there is a lot of water throughout the solar system, there are also many exoplanets similar to Earth. The words were supported by infographics .

Among the technologies that are designed to ensure the finding of signs of life, there is a space telescope named after James Webb, which is scheduled to launch in 2018. This and some other future telescopes will block the light from the stars in order to better see exoplanets. Also, signs of life will help to find a more detailed spectral analysis, for example, it is important to detect free oxygen.