BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Firsts in Space – Quiz *new*

We walked on the Moon. Rovers explore Mars. The International Space Station has been continuously inhabited since 2000. We're in contact with the world and the cosmos via satellite. We take it for granted, but there had to be a first time for everything. How many of these space firsts do you know?

Firsts in Space – Quiz

Looking back, John Logsdon wrote

Radio amateurs could pick up the Sputnik's signal as it orbited. Here is a NASA recording of its beep beep beep.

You can relive the very First Orbit by a human being of the Earth. This article tells you more about the background to the film. Or you can go straight to the film First Orbit.

An infographic by Karl Tate, SPACE.com Infographics Artist on John Glenn. He wasn't the first American in space, but he was the first to orbit the Earth. He was also the oldest person in space when he joined the space shuttle crew for a mission many years after his Friendship 7 flight.

Who's ever heard of Gherman Titov? He was the second man in space. Although Yuri Gagarin's name is well known, somehow the collective memory rarely takes in the second of anything.

Gagarin and Titov trained together for the first mission. Titov was obviously disappointed, but must have realized afterwards that he got the best of the deal. The first mission was one orbit only. The second mission was 16 orbits. Titov was also able to experiment with steering the spacecraft, but the first mission was completely controlled from the ground. Titov also took photographs of the Earth.

Because of the length of Titov's mission, he was expected to sleep. That's when he had the unpleasant experience of being the first person to suffer from space sickness. He was ok while he was busy, but when he closed his eyes he was beset by nausea. However he overcame it and did get some sleep.

Telstar didn't do very much in terms of what we're used to now. Anyone born after 1962 has never lived in a world where the news couldn't be transmitted around the world, sometimes as it happens.

Telstar, on the other hand, orbited every 2 hours and 47 minutes. It could only transmit when it was over the Atlantic, and that happened for about twenty minutes of each orbit. But it was a fascinating novelty at the time.

The Soviet Union's Mars 3 made the first successful soft landing on Mars. Although it landed safely it stopped transmitting after 14.5 seconds, so the lander was not a success. The Soviets were never able conclusively to work out where the transmission failure was - the lander itself or the relay on the orbiter, and what role, if any, a powerful dust storm may have had in the failure.

Salyut 1 was the first crewed space station. It was assembled on Earth and launched from the Soviet cosmodrome at Baikonur. But it had a sad ending. The first crew couldn't get into the station because of problems docking the Soyuz spacecraft with the station. However they returned safely to Earth. The second crew manned the space station and set a new record for time in space after being on board for 23 days. Sadly, due to a malfunction in the Soyuz the cosmonauts were killed during re-entry.

The Soyuz was given a design overhaul and while this was happening, it was obvious that Salyut would run out of fuel. Although the atmosphere is very thin where Salyut was orbiting, there is still some drag on a satellite, so at some point it will drop out of orbit. This means that it needs fuel occasionally to lift it into a higher orbit. There was no way of getting any more fuel to Salyut, so it was taken out of orbit in a planned de-orbit. This means you can control when and approximately where the debris will fall.

Think of all the thousands and thousands of years for which humans have seen the Moon. There are patterns of dark areas. These are created by the lunar maria which are large impact craters that filled with lava and then solidified into a dark basalt-like rock. Maybe you see "the man in the Moon" or a rabbit or something else, depending on how your culture views it. But the same side of the Moon always faces us, so the one thing no human had ever seen was the far side of the Moon.

On October 7, 1959 the Soviet Luna 3 mission took the first pictures of the unseen side of the Moon. The resolution was low and there was a lot of "noise" in the images, but they showed the far side didn't look like the near side of the Moon. The terrain was mountainous and the large maria were missing.

The first photographs from the surface of Venus were sent back to Earth by the Soviet Venera 9 mission.