1. India’s first ever satellite Aryabhatta was launched by the Soviet Union in 1975. But which was the first Indian satellite to be placed in orbit by an Indian-made launch vehicle?
2. Which epic film is based on a 1948 short story that was written for a competition and later published in the magazine, 10 Story Fantasy ?
5. If Mariner 4 was the first spacecraft to fly past Mars, which planet was first photographed and approached by Pioneer 10?
6. Which American space probe, launched in September 1977, has become the first ever man-made object to exit the solar system and is currently around 22 billion km from Earth?
7. In June 1963, which former textile worker and amateur skydiver became the first woman to have flown in space, on Vostok 6?
8. The Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF) is one of the most powerful space telescopes, launched by NASA in 1999 in order to detect faint and distant X-ray sources. Whom is it named after?
9. If the first was Enterprise, and the next four were Columbia, Challenger, Endeavour and Discovery. Which was the last?
10. Baikonur Cosmodrome is the world’s first and largest space launch facility, located in a desert steppe north of the Syr Darya river. In which country is it currently located?
Answers
1. Rohini, launched by the SLV-3 rocket
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey , based on the Arthur C Clarke story, The Sentinel
3. The Mir Space Station. The other two are the Core Mir Module and the Docking Module
4. Eugene Cernan; He and Harrison Schmitt and he were the last to explore the moon’s surface on the Apollo 17 expedition in December 1972
5. Jupiter, in 1973
6. Voyager 1. In about 40,000 years it will come close to the star Gliese 445
7. Valentina Tereshkova
8. Chandra, after Indian American astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrashekhar
9. Atlantis, the six space shuttles built by NASA. Atlantis flew its last mission in 2011
10. Kazakhstan; the spaceport is on lease to Russia till 2050
Joy Bhattacharjya is a quizmaster;
Twitter: @joybhattacharj