Astronautics questions

The first woman in space, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, flew in 1963. Space flight programs were slow to employ women, and only began to include them from the 1980s. Most women in space have been United States citizens, with missions on the Space Shuttle and on the International Space Station.

Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977. Part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System, Voyager 1 was launched 16 days after its twin, Voyager 2. Having operated for 41 years, 7 months and 29 days as of May 4, 2019, the spacecraft still communicates with the Deep Space Network to receive routine commands and to transmit data to Earth. At a distance of 145 AU (21.7 billion km; 13.5 billion mi) from Earth as of February 22, 2019, it is the most distant from Earth of all known man-made objects.

Fallen Astronaut is an 8.5-centimeter (3.3 in) aluminium sculpture created by Paul Van Hoeydonck, meant to intended to commemorate the astronauts and cosmonauts who have died in the advancement of space exploration. During the Apollo 15 mission, near the completion of his work on the lunar surface on August 1, 1971, Scott secretly placed the Fallen Astronaut on the Moon.

The fender extension on the Apollo 17 LRV broke when accidentally bumped by Eugene Cernan with a hammer handle. A replacement "fender" was made with some EVA maps, duct tape, and a pair of clamps from inside the Lunar Module that were nominally intended for the moveable overhead light.

The Early prototype Mercury spacecraft had only two portholes, but the Mercury astronauts demanded a larger window to be installed, not only for the view but also for the orientation. The latter proved invaluable on their last mission, when instrument failure required visual orientation.

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. Although not the first space telescope, Hubble is one of the largest and most versatile, and is well known as both a vital research tool and a public relations boon for astronomy.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. President Dwight D. Eisenhower established NASA in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science.

Valeri Vladimirovich Polyakov was a Russian cosmonaut. He stayed aboard the Mir space station for more than 14 months (437 days 18 hours) during a single mission.

Viking 1 was the first of two spacecraft (along with Viking 2) sent to Mars as part of NASA's Viking program. On July 20, 1976, it became the first spacecraft to land successfully on Mars and perform its mission. Viking 1 held the record for the longest Mars surface mission of 2307 days until that record was broken by Opportunity on May 19, 2010.

Kepler is a space observatory launched by NASA to discover Earth-size planets orbiting other stars. Named after astronomer Johannes Kepler, the spacecraft was launched on March , 2009, in. Designed to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way to discover Earth-size exoplanets in or near habitable zones and estimate how many of the billions of stars in the Milky Way have such planets,