Space Exploration and Astronomy

Laika was a Soviet space dog who became one of the first animals in space and the first animal to orbit the Earth aboard Sputnik 2 in 1957.

M. Annadurai served as the project director for Chandrayaan-1.

Mir was a Soviet space station that operated in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001.

Vostok is the Russian word for East. The Vostok program was the Soviet human spaceflight project.

Luna 1 was the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon and the first to perform a flyby of the Moon in 1959.

In outer space, there is no atmosphere to scatter sunlight, which is why the sky does not appear blue as it does on Earth. Consequently, the lack of scattered light makes space appear black.

Valentina Tereshkova, a Soviet cosmonaut, became the first woman to fly in space in 1963. The Soviet Union achieved this milestone during the Space Race.

Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere on February 1, 2003, resulting in the death of all seven crew members, including Kalpana Chawla.

The Baikonur Cosmodrome, which Russia leases for its space missions, is located in Kazakhstan.

The Rutan Voyager was the first aircraft to fly around the world without stopping or refueling, piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager in 1986.

Anousheh Ansari is an Iranian-American engineer who became the first self-funded woman to fly to the International Space Station in 2006. The other names are variations that do not refer to the actual astronaut.

Sputnik 1 was the first artificial Earth satellite, launched by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957.

The words in each pair are antonyms.

TIROS-1 (Television Infrared Observation Satellite) was the first weather satellite, launched in 1960. The option 'Tiras-I' appears to be a misspelling of TIROS-1. Bhaskara-I was Indian, Meteostat is European.