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Outta This World Pitching
Last week we saw one of the fastest pitches in baseball history. The first pitch of the game between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox flew by at 17,210 miles per hour. That's because it was thrown in the International Space Station or ISS for short. The ISS is 220 miles above Earth, and it orbits the planet 15 times a day!
Astronaut Garrett Reisman threw the ball, while floating in the space station. The toss was shown on a giant video screen at Yankee Stadium.
The ISS is being built piece by piece. Work on it began in 1998 and it's still not finished. For the past seven years, astronauts from China, Russia, the US, and other countries have been onboard, working together to do research and build the station. It's scheduled to be complete in 2010. Some of the research on the station is to see how living without gravity affects the human body. One day NASA might use what we learn on the ISS to make long space trips to places like Mars.
Astronaut Reisman is a lifelong Yankee fan, and even brought dirt from Yankee Stadium with him from outer space. He said that our planet is in a Yankee Universe. Red Sox fans don't agree, but they didn't have a fan orbiting Earth to say otherwise!
I'm Lucy and that's what happened in sports this week!
Photo: NASA
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