BREMERTON – About 100 people were treated to a whirlwind tour of the solar system – and beyond – by a NASA Ambassador who spoke about what space probes and astronauts have discovered.

About 100 people gathered at McCloud’s Grille in East Bremerton to listen to NASA Ambassador Ward Yohe April 27.

To give a sense of the scale size of our solar system, Yohe held up a tennis ball. If the ball represented a scale model of our sun, he said, earth would be like a spitball some 26 feet away, and the dwarf planet Eris – which orbits the furthest edges of the solar system – would be half a mile away, at the Wheaton Way Bridge. At that scale, the next closest star, Proxima Centauri, would be a tennis ball in Phoenix, Arizona.

Yohe said NASA’s twin STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) satellites were among the instruments used to monitor the sun, including its coronal mass ejections and solar flares. Only half of the sun is visible from Earth, but the STEREO satellites can monitor both halves of the sun to keep an eye on developing sunspots.

The satellites helped determine that “tsunamis” of solar plasma with waves thousands of miles high can ripple across the suns surface when sunspots erupt. Powerful charged particles from the sun have the potential to damage electronic equipment on and around Earth.

The planet Mercury orbits closest to the sun and has an average  temperature of 332 degrees Fahrenheit. NASA’s MESSANGER satellite, launched in 2004, was designed to study the hot planet.

MESSENGER flew by Earth once and flew by Venus twice to make the trip to Mercury. The satellite did three flybys of Mercury prior to being inserted into Mercury orbit for research in 2011. MESSENGER ran out of propellant and crashed into Mercury at a speed of 8,750 miles per hour on April 30, 2015.

Venus, the next planet out, is about the same size as Earth but its average temperature – 867 F – is about three times as high as Mercury’s.

“It has a really thick carbon dioxide atmosphere,” Yohe said of Venus’ greenhouse-gas environs, along with high atmospheric pressure.

The Russians sent several of its Venera probes to Venus.

“It was a sphere of titanium and it lasted about an hour before it was destroyed” by the harsh conditions, Yohe said of the probe.

Much cooler is Earth, with an average temperature of 59 F and plenty of water.

“My favorite planet by far,” Yohe said. “As far as we know, liquid water is a big deal for life.”

Earth’s atmosphere is 21 percent oxygen and the planet’s liquid iron-nickle outer core generates a magnetic field strong enough to protect life from charged solar particles.

Those particles are responsible for Aurora Borealis. In 1859, Yohe said, a solar storm was so strong that auroras could be seen at the equator and telegraph machines caught fire.

Satellites, too, can be affected by the storms. Their instruments help provide information about Earth. As an example, Yohe said satellites that orbit Earth confirmed the existance of “rogue waves” – randomly generated 100-foot waves that form in the ocean and can pose threats to ships.

Human spaceflight also provided a wealth of knowledge.

Early spacecraft were “cozy,” Yohe said.

“Picture your chair with metal around it,” he said.

The space shuttle, operated from 1981-2011, was also fairly cramped, but the International Space Station provided needed space for experiments.

The ISS was the most complex engineering feat ever accomplished in human history, Yohe said. It orbits Earth at an altitude of 250 miles and a speed of 17,000 miles per hour.

“I think it should be up there with the Great Wall of China and the pyramids,” Yohe said of the ISS.

Space suits were like miniature spaceships, capable of withstanding temperature ranges from -200 F to 200 F.

240 miles high might sound like a lot, Yohe said, but it was important to bear in mind the immense scale of space. The moon, for example, was about 240,000 miles away from Earth.

Rockets 40 stories tall could take humans to the moon again. Six missions landed men on the moon. The astronauts averaged two days on the surface – just a “toe in the water” worth of explortion, Yohe said.

The moon stabilizes the tilt of Earth’s axis and gives Earth its seaons.

Yohe said future missions to the moon could establish a permanent moon base.

The famous 1968 Earthrise photograph was not a view of Earth that people were used to at the time.

“We went to the moon to find the moon and we found the Earth in the process,” Yohe said. “When this picture was taken there were only 3 billion people on the planet,” he added.

The moon’s pockmarked surface shows it has been hit several times by objects. Earth, too, has been struck several times but plant life and oceans hide much of the evidence.

Mars has a thin atmosphere and a canyon four times as deep as Earths’ Grand Canyon. At present, five orbiters are studying Mars.

“Mars used to be wetter and warmer,” and perhaps hosted life, Yohe said.

Children alive today could be among the first to walk on Mars, he said.

Jupiter could have been a star had it been vastly more massive. Its giant red spot is three times the size of Earth.

Could Europa, moon of Jupiter, contain oceans and thus harbor life?

“We’d certainly like to send a submarine up there to find out,” Yohe said.

Saturn takes 29 years to orbit the sun. The Cassini probe took the “ultimate selfie” of Saturn. In the photo, Earth appears as a small dot.

“Everybody in this room is in that picture,” Yohe said.

One of Saturn’s moons, Titan, has rivers and lakes of liquid methane.

Former planet Pluto – now classified a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt – takes more than 247 years to orbit the sun. The entire history of the U.S. fits within one orbit of Pluto, Yohe said.

Yohe said NASA’s budget was just one half of one percent of the federal budget.

“I think we get pretty good bang for our buck,” he said.

Yohe’s final image was a deep field image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble pointed at a tiny slice of “empty” space and took a long exposure. The end result was a photograph that revealed over 2,000 galaxies.

There are over 100 billion galaxies in the universe, Yohe said, with more stars than there are grains of sand on Earth.

“So we are not going to run out of things to learn.”