Space – GK Questions

Salyut 1 was the first space station launched into low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on April 19, 1971.

A lunar eclipse occurs when the Earth passes between the Sun and the Moon, casting a shadow on the Moon. This alignment can only happen during a full moon.

JAXA's Hayabusa2 mission successfully collected samples from the asteroid Ryugu and returned them to Earth in December 2020.

The NavIC constellation consists of 7 satellites: 3 in geostationary orbit and 4 in inclined geosynchronous orbit.

LPSC has a major facility in Mahendragiri, Tamil Nadu, where liquid and cryogenic stages are tested and integrated.

Mercury has a very thin exosphere rather than a true atmosphere. It is too small and hot to retain a significant atmosphere, leading to extreme temperature fluctuations.

The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way. It is expected to collide with the Milky Way in about 4.5 billion years.

Aditya-L1 is India's first solar mission, designed to study the Sun's corona, solar emissions, and space weather.

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is an orbit around Earth with an altitude between 160 km and 2,000 km. Most satellites, including the ISS and Hubble, operate in LEO.

Neil Armstrong served as the commander of the Apollo 11 mission, which landed the first humans on the Moon in 1969.

Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It is so large that it is also classified as a dwarf planet.

Roscosmos, the Russian state space corporation, is responsible for the Soyuz spacecraft, which has been used for decades to transport cosmonauts and astronauts to the ISS.

RISAT (Radar Imaging Satellite) series uses Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology, which allows imaging day and night, and through cloud cover, unlike optical satellites.

Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star in the constellation Orion. It is one of the largest stars visible to the naked eye and is expected to explode as a supernova in the future.

Chandrayaan-1, India's first lunar probe, was launched by ISRO in October 2008. It operated until August 2009.

Jupiter has the strongest magnetic field of all the planets in the Solar System, about 20,000 times stronger than Earth's.

The Space Shuttle program was operated by NASA (USA) from 1981 to 2011. It was the world's first reusable spacecraft system.

Geostationary satellites orbit at an altitude of approximately 35,786 km (often rounded to 36,000 km) above the Earth's equator.

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation is the oldest light in the universe, dating back to about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. It effectively marks the limit of the observable universe in terms of time/light.

The Philae lander, part of the ESA's Rosetta mission, became the first spacecraft to soft-land on a comet (67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko) in November 2014.