"Space", according to the Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space"!

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The planet Earth spins about the North and South poles taking 24 hours (or 1 day) to complete 1 revolution.

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Orbiting the Earth is our Moon. The Moon is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun.

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The Moon is about 380,000 km from Earth. It takes 1.26 seconds for light to travel from the Moon to the Earth.

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It takes 28 days for the Moon to orbit the Earth. It is in synchronous rotation with the Earth which means that we only ever see one side of it.

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The gravity of the Moon affects the Earth's oceans. Together with the gravity from the sun and the rotation of the Earth, sea levels rise and fall creating tides.

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Approximately twice a month when the Sun, Moon and Earth form a line the gravitational forces from the Moon and Sun give the largest tides known as "spring tides". When the Sun and Moon are 90 degrees apart, the Sun's force reduces that from the Moon and we get smaller tides known as "neap tides".

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The Soviet Union's Luna programme was the first to reach the Moon with an unmanned spacecraft in 1959.

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In 1969, the United States' NASA Apollo 11 was the first spaceflight that put a man on the Moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to walk on the Moon's surface and spent about 2 and a half hours outside the spacecraft collecting lunar material for return to Earth.

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"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." - Neil Armstrong​