Space Exploration and Astronomy

Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon in 1969. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first to walk on the lunar surface.

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory is a major particle accelerator designed to study the fundamental properties of matter.

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans are primarily used in medical imaging to observe metabolic processes in the body, making them essential for clinical diagnostics and metabolic research.

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory is designed to collide heavy ions to study the quark-gluon plasma.

Chlorella pyrenoidosa is a possible food source in an anticipated space flight. As a source of nitrogen for protein synthesis, it will assist in the decomposition of human waste like faeces and urine.

Luna 2 (Lunik II) was the first human-made object to reach the surface of the Moon, impacting it in 1959. It was not a soft-lander or a robot in the modern sense.

New Horizons was a NASA space probe launched in 2006 with the primary mission of performing a flyby study of the Pluto system.

Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, was launched into orbit on October 4, 1957, using the R-7 Semyorka rocket.

Christa McAuliffe was a teacher selected to be the first private citizen in space as part of the Teacher in Space Project, though she tragically died in the Challenger disaster.

NASA stands for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which is the space agency of the United States of America.

NASA's Magellan spacecraft, launched in 1989, was the first robotic mission to map the surface of Venus using radar.

Chang'e-1 was China's first lunar orbiter, launched in 2007. It marked a significant milestone in the Chinese space program.

April 12 was already a huge day in space history twenty years before the launch of the first shuttle mission. On that day in 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (left, on the way to the launch pad) became the first human in space, making a 108-minute orbital flight in his Vostok 1 spacecraft. Newspapers like The Huntsville Times (right) trumpeted Gagarin's accomplishment.Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space less than a month later. 

Nandini Sharma is the student who won a science project competition for her work on garlic as a food preservative, leading to an asteroid being named after her.