Fun facts from the Astro Zoo

Can't get enough of interstellar zoo keeping? Well here are some interesting factoids about the animals featured in EyeToy® Play: Astro Zoo.

EyeToy® Play: Astro Zoo gives players the chance to have fun rounding up a whole host of wild and wonderful animals back to safety on an interplanetary space zoo, using the EyeToy® USB Camera. As a Space Zookeeper, it's up to you to put the Astro Zoo back in order after a speeding comet has spun things out of control, leading to over 60 animal-tastic games to play through for up to two players. So to tie-in with this galactic jaunt, here are some interesting nuggets of space related factual information about some of the animals you'll be interacting with in the most unique zoo in the universe.

Space, snakes, skunks and simians

The longest anaconda ever found was 11.4 metres long - but that's nothing compared to the distances found in space. The Moon is so far away from the Earth that it would take over 33 million giant anacondas tied head-to-tail to reach it.

Skunks are known for the revoltingly smelly liquid that they spray when threatened. However, if a skunk were to attack you on the Moon, you wouldn't be able to smell it - because the Moon has no air.

Monkeys have already been in space, long before joining the Astro Zoo. In 1958, NASA launched a small squirrel monkey named Gordo into orbit. Since then, several other monkeys and a chimpanzee named Enos have circled Earth in spacecrafts.

Artic animal astronomy

Polar bears have thick coats that keep them warm even in Arctic temperatures of -45°C. Night-time temperatures on the Moon, though, are too cold even for polar bears - it can get as cold as -123°C on the Moon's chilly surface!

You could never lift a full-grown walrus; they can weigh 1,900 kg - as much as a small car. In space, though, you could pick a walrus up with one hand. That's because there's no gravity in space, which means that the heaviest of animals would weigh nothing.

Sea the universe

The Moon has an area called the Sea of Tranquility, but blowfish, penguins and sharks would have a hard time living on it - because this sea has no water. Although early astronomers thought it was a sea of water, it's actually just a dark area of rock.

The Blue Whale is the largest animal on the planet - it grows up to 33 metres long and can weigh 180 tonnes. The rockets that are used to launch the Space Shuttle would be powerful enough to lift 14 Blue Whales in one go. 

Frogs have been in space before as well. In 1970, two bullfrogs orbited the Earth in their own special spacecraft called the Orbiting Frog Otolith. The OFO was less than one metre long and orbited the Earth seven times. The idea was to see how weightlessness affected the frogs' balance - NASA chose frogs because the balance sensors in their heads are very similar to those of humans. 

Mammals across the Milky Way

There are over one billion sheep on Earth - that's 1,000,000,000,000 sheep when you write the full number - but that's nothing compared to the number of stars in the Milky Way. The Milky Way is made up of a whopping 200 billion stars - that's 200 stars for every sheep!

Baby pandas will grow to 900 times their original size in their lifetime - that's almost the equivalent of the Earth growing to the size of the huge gas planet Jupiter!