The Space Station circles the Earth every 90 minutes, and looks down on 85 percent of the populated areas.

The construction of the Space Station is a collaboration of 100,000 people, hundreds of companies, and sixteen nations spread over four continents, among them the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

The Space Station is the most expensive single object ever built. The United States' participation has been estimated at $96 billion - a figure that nearly equals the combined cost of all of the Apollo missions to the moon.

The human body tends to lose muscle and bone mass rapidly in space. To fight this loss, at least two hours of strenuous exercise is built into every astronaut's daily schedule on the Space Station.

The Space Station consists of 70 separate major components and hundreds of minor ones, all of which will be assembled for the first time in space.

The Space Station is the largest manned object ever sent into space, encompassing 43,000 cubic feet of living and working space - the equivalent of two Boeing 747's

The Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) is a NASA-sponsored satellite mission that is providing state-of-the-art measurements of incoming x-ray, ultraviolet, visible, near-infrared, and total solar radiation.

The total mass of the SDO Spacecraft at launch is 3200 kg (payload 270 kg; fuel 1400 kg).

The goal of the Living With a Star program is to develop the scientific understanding necessary to effectively address those aspects of the connected Sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society.

SDO is a 3-axis stabilized spacecraft with two solar arrays and two high-gain antennas, and will orbit at 36,000 km in a circular geosynchronous orbit at 102° W longitude inclined at 28.5°.

The SDO will generate approximately 1.5 Terabytes of data per day.

The primary mission of the Solar Dynamics Observatory is scheduled to last 5 years 3 months, with expendables expected to last for 10 years.

Goddard's first 157 employees transferred from the United States Navy's Project Vanguard missile program, but continued their work at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. while the center was under construction.

Until May 1, 1959, NASA's presence in Greenbelt, Maryland was known as the Beltsville Space Center. It was then renamed the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), after Dr. Robert H. Goddard.

Typically, unmanned earth observation missions and observatories in Earth orbit are managed by Goddard Space Flight Center, while unmanned planetary missions are managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is home to the nation's largest organization of combined scientists, engineers and technologists that build spacecraft, instruments and new technology to study the Earth, the sun, our solar system, and the universe.

Scientists would like to understand when the stars that we see today and the chemical elements that make up our Milky Way galaxy were formed. With its ultraviolet observations, GALEX is filling in one of the key pieces of this puzzle.

GALEX is also identifying celestial objects for further study by ongoing and future missions and GALEX data now populates a large, unprecedented archive available to the entire astronomical community and to the general public.

GALEX’s observations are telling scientists how galaxies, the basic structures of our Universe, evolve and change. Additionally, GALEX observations are investigating the causes of star formation during a period when most of the stars and elements we see today had their origins.

Led by the California Institute of Technology, GALEX is conducting several first-of-a-kind sky surveys, including an extra-galactic (beyond our galaxy) ultraviolet all-sky survey.

Although originally planned as a 29-month mission, the NASA Senior Review Panel in 2006 recommended that the GALEX mission lifetime be extended.

The Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) is an orbiting space telescope observing galaxies in ultraviolet light across 10 billion years of cosmic history.

2000 The first crew of three takes up residence in the international space station.

1981 Maiden voyage of the first space shuttle, Columbia.