query: part_of mercury-atlas 9
supports: Juan Ponce de León (1474  July 1521) was a Spanish explorer and conquistador. He became the first Governor of Puerto Rico by appointment of the Spanish crown. He led the first known European expedition to "La Florida", which he named during his first voyage to the area in 1513. Though in popular culture, he was supposedly searching for the Fountain of Youth, there is no contemporary evidence to support the story, which is likely a myth. Asia is Earth's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres and sharing the continental landmass of Eurasia with the continent of Europe. Asia covers an area of , about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area. The continent, which has long been home to the majority of the human population, was the site of many of the first civilizations. Asia is notable for not only its overall large size and population, but also dense and large settlements as well as vast barely populated regions within the continent of 4.4 billion people. The Americas, also collectively called America, encompass the totality of the continents of North America and South America. Together they make up most of Earth's western hemisphere and comprise the "New World".  A test pilot is an aviator who flies new and modified aircraft in specific maneuvers, known as flight test techniques or FTTs, allowing the results to be measured and the design to be evaluated.  Antarctica (US English , UK English or ) is Earth's southernmost continent. It contains the geographic South Pole and is situated in the Antarctic region of the Southern Hemisphere, almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle, and is surrounded by the Southern Ocean. At , it is the fifth-largest continent. For comparison, Antarctica is nearly twice the size of Australia. About 98% of Antarctica is covered by ice that averages in thickness, which extends to all but the northernmost reaches of the Antarctic Peninsula. Mercury - Atlas 9 was the final manned space mission of the U.S. Mercury program , launched on May 15 , 1963 from Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral , Florida . The spacecraft , named Faith 7 , completed 22 Earth orbits before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean , piloted by astronaut Gordon Cooper , then an Air Force major . The Atlas rocket was No. 130 - D , and the Mercury spacecraft was No. 20 . This mission marks the last time an American was launched alone to conduct an entirely solo orbital mission . Conquistadors (from Portuguese or Spanish "conquistadores" "conquerors" ) is a term used to refer to the soldiers and explorers of the Spanish Empire or the Portuguese Empire in a general sense. During the Age of Discovery, conquistadors sailed beyond Europe to the Americas, Oceania, Africa and Asia, conquering territory and opening trade routes. They colonized much of the world for Spain and Portugal in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States, running from 1958 through 1963. An early highlight of the Space Race, its goal was to put a man into Earth orbit and return him safely, ideally before the Soviet Union. Taken over from the U.S. Air Force by the newly created civilian space agency NASA, it conducted twenty unmanned developmental flights (some using animals), and six successful flights by astronauts. The program, which took its name from the god of travel in Roman mythology, cost $277 million in 1965 US dollars, and involved the work of 2 million people. The astronauts were collectively known as the "Mercury Seven", and each spacecraft was given a name ending with a "7" by its pilot. An ocean (the sea of classical antiquity) is a body of saline water that composes much of a planet's hydrosphere. On Earth, an ocean is one of the major conventional divisions of the World Ocean, which covers almost 71% of its surface. These are, in descending order by area, the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern (Antarctic), and Arctic Oceans. The word "sea" is often used interchangeably with "ocean" in American English but, strictly speaking, a sea is a body of saline water (generally a division of the world ocean) partly or fully enclosed by land. Leroy Gordon "Gordo" Cooper Jr. (March 6, 1927  October 4, 2004), (Col, USAF), better known as Gordon Cooper, was an American aerospace engineer, test pilot, United States Air Force pilot, and one of the seven original astronauts in Project Mercury, the first manned space program of the United States. The Straits of Florida, Florida Straits, or Florida Strait is a strait located south-southeast of the North American mainland, generally accepted to be between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, and between the Florida Keys (U.S.) and Cuba. It is 150 km (93 mi) wide at the narrowest point between Key West and the Cuban shore, and has been sounded to a depth of 6,000 feet. The strait carries the Florida Current, the beginning of the Gulf Stream, from the Gulf of Mexico. Florida (Spanish for "land of flowers") is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, and to the south by the Straits of Florida and Cuba. Florida is the 22nd most extensive, the 3rd most populous, and the 8th most densely populated of the U.S. states. Jacksonville is the most populous municipality in the state and is the largest city by area in the contiguous United States. The Miami metropolitan area is Florida's most populous urban area. The city of Tallahassee is the state capital. The Arctic (or ) is a polar region located at the northernmost part of Earth. The Arctic consists of the Arctic Ocean, adjacent seas, and parts of Alaska (United States), Canada, Finland, Greenland (Denmark), Iceland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden. Land within the Arctic region has seasonally varying snow and ice cover, with predominantly treeless permafrost-containing tundra. Arctic seas contain seasonal sea ice in many places. The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth's oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south and is bounded by Asia and Australia in the west and the Americas in the east. The contiguous United States consists of the 48 adjoining U.S. states plus Washington, D.C. (federal district), on the continent of North America. The term excludes the non-contiguous states of Alaska and Hawaii and all off-shore United States territories and possessions, which include American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area. The neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and East Timor to the north; the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to the north-east; and New Zealand to the south-east. Australia's capital is Canberra, and its largest urban area is Sydney. The Southern Ocean, also known as the Antarctic Ocean or the Austral Ocean, comprises the southernmost waters of the World Ocean, generally taken to be south of 60° S latitude and encircling Antarctica. As such, it is regarded as the fourth-largest of the five principal oceanic divisions: smaller than the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans but larger than the Arctic Ocean. This ocean zone is where cold, northward flowing waters from the Antarctic mix with warmer subantarctic waters. The Arctic Ocean is the smallest and shallowest of the world's five major oceans. The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) recognizes it as an ocean, although some oceanographers call it the Arctic Mediterranean Sea or simply the Arctic Sea, classifying it a mediterranean sea or an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean. Alternatively, the Arctic Ocean can be seen as the northernmost part of the all-encompassing World Ocean. Cape Canaveral, from the Spanish "Cabo Cañaveral", is a cape in Brevard County, Florida, United States, near the center of the state's Atlantic coast. Known as Cape Kennedy from 1963 to 1973, it lies east of Merritt Island, separated from it by the Banana River. It was discovered by the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León in 1513. Alabama is a state in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama is the 30th-most extensive and the 24th-most populous of the U.S. states. At nearly , Alabama has one of the nation's longest navigable inland waterways. Brevard County is a county in the state of Florida. As of the 2010 census, the population was 543,376, making it the 10th largest county in Florida. The official county seat has been located in Titusville since 1894. Brevard County comprises the Palm BayMelbourneTitusville, FL Metropolitan Statistical Area. It is located along the east Florida coast along the Atlantic Ocean. The Banana River is a lagoon that lies between Cape Canaveral and Merritt Island in Brevard County, Florida in the United States. It is part of the Indian River Lagoon system, and connects at its south end to the Indian River; it is the only part of the lagoon system not in the Intracoastal Waterway. It also has an outlet to the Atlantic Ocean via a lock into Port Canaveral. The lagoon includes salt marshes, mangrove swamps, seagrass beds, drift algae, oyster bars, tidal flats, and spoil islands, providing habitats for many marine species.These are brackish waters mixed of salt and fresh water;waist deep with a soft bottom sand/grass. Commercial and recreational activities in the lagoon generate more than US$ 800 million annually for the local economy. The Antarctic (US English , UK English or and or ) is a polar region, specifically the region around the Earth's South Pole, opposite the Arctic region around the North Pole. The Antarctic comprises in the strict sense the continent of Antarctica and the island territories located on the Antarctic Plate. In a broader sense the Antarctic region include the ice shelves, waters, and island territories in the Southern Ocean situated south of the Antarctic Convergence, a zone approximately wide varying in latitude seasonally. The region covers some 20% of the Southern Hemisphere, of which 5.5% (14 million km) is the surface area of the Antarctic continent itself. All of the land and ice shelves south of 60°S latitude are administrated under the Antarctic Treaty System. In a biogeographic sense, the Antarctic ecozone is one of eight ecozones of the Earth's land surface. The United States Air Force (USAF) is the aerial warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven American uniformed services. Initially part of the United States Army, the USAF was formed as a separate branch of the military on 18 September 1947 under the National Security Act of 1947. It is the most recent branch of the U.S. military to be formed, and is the largest and one of the world's most technologically advanced air forces. The USAF articulates its core functions as Nuclear Deterrence Operations, Special Operations, Air Superiority, Global Integrated ISR, Space Superiority, Command and Control, Cyberspace Superiority, Personnel Recovery, Global Precision Attack, Building Partnerships, Rapid Global Mobility and Agile Combat Support. Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is a country comprising the island of Cuba as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located in the northern Caribbean where the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean meet. It is south of both the U.S. state of Florida and the Bahamas, west of Haiti, and north of Jamaica. Havana is the largest city and capital; other major cities include Santiago de Cuba and Camagüey. Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean, with an area of , and the second-most populous after Hispaniola, with over 11 million inhabitants. The Atlantic Ocean is the second largest of the world's oceans with a total area of about . It covers approximately 20 percent of the Earth's surface and about 29 percent of its water surface area. It separates the "Old World" from the "New World". A "metropolitan area", sometimes referred to as a "metro area" or just "metro", is a region consisting of a densely populated urban core and its less-populated surrounding territories, sharing industry, infrastructure, and housing.
  A metro area usually comprises multiple jurisdictions and municipalities: neighborhoods, townships, boroughs, cities, towns, exurbs, suburbs, counties, districts, states, and even nations like the eurodistricts. As social, economic and political institutions have changed, metropolitan areas have become key economic and political regions. Metropolitan areas include one or more urban areas, as well as satellite cities, towns and intervening rural areas that are socio-economically tied to the urban core, typically measured by commuting patterns. The Gulf of Mexico is an ocean basin largely surrounded by the North American continent. It is bounded on the northeast, north and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the United States, on the southwest and south by Mexico, and on the southeast by Cuba. The U.S. states of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas border the Gulf on the north, which are often referred to as the "Third Coast" in comparison with the U.S. Atlantic and Pacific coasts, or sometimes the "south coast", in juxtaposition to the Great Lakes region being the "north coast." One of the gulf's seven main areas is the Gulf of Mexico basin. Earth, otherwise known as the world, is the third planet from the Sun and the only object in the Universe known to harbor life. It is the densest planet in the Solar System and the largest of the four terrestrial planets.
candidates: 1927 1963 1973 africa aircraft antarctic arctic ocean asia atlantic ocean australia banana bay bottom c caribbean caribbean sea center city classical antiquity country crown denmark discovery earth empire english eurasia great lakes gulf of mexico indian river lagoon industry islands july landmass life march mediterranean sea mercury mercury seven military mythology name north america ocean october orbit organization part port portuguese project mercury puerto rico recovery river roman mythology sea soviet union spacecraft species state the americas the republic trade united states air force universe warfare
answer: project mercury