Unveiling the Cosmos Trivia Quiz

The first stages of space flight involved developing the relevant technology. While there had been some proposals in the 19th century, it was 1903 when Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published 'Exploration of the Universe with Rocket-Propelled Vehicles', which showed that manned space flight was technically possible using multi staged rockets that employed liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as their fuel. However, Robert Goddard patented these in 1914, and he is often credited with being the father of rocketry - he was certainly an ardent exponent, and launched the first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926.

The first rocket to reach space was a German V-2 rocket, which was launched on a vertical test flight in June 1944. It reached a maximum height of 176 km (109 mi) before returning to earth. This height is well outside the distance that was later agreed on (by most) as defining the boundary between the earth's atmosphere and space, the Kármán line. The Kármán line is defined as an height of 100 kilometres (62 miles or 330,000 feet) above mean sea level.

To successfully launch a satellite, it is necessary to have enough speed so that the satellite can travel in a circular orbit, with its horizontal speed sufficient to maintain its altitude against the pull of gravity. The higher the orbit, the greater the speed needed. Sputnik 1, launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 4 October 1957, established itself in orbit at a mean altitude of 215 km (133.6 mi), becoming the first artificial Earth satellite.

Less than a month later, on 3 November 1957, Sputnik 2 carried a dog named Laika, who became the first animal to orbit the Earth (although she did not survive long, and is thought to have died from overheating after completing around four orbits). There had been earlier animals sent into space, but not into orbit. The very first were fruit flies in an American V2 rocket, sent up in 1947. In 1949 another American rocket sent a rhesus monkey named Albert II into space, while the USSR sent two dogs (named Dezik and Tsygan) into space in 1951. They became the first animals to return safely from their voyage.

While both the USSR and the USA had been working towards space flight since World War II, the launching of Sputnik in 1957 marked a significant point in the competition to control space. Satellites were all very well (and useful for meteorology and communications, as well as military purposes), but getting humans up there was seen as the next goal. It was achieved when Yuri Gagarin completed one orbit of the Earth in 108 minutes on 12 April 1961. He this became the first human to reach space, and the first to orbit the Earth.

The first American to reach space was Alan Shepard, on 5 May 1961. Since he actually controlled aspects of the flight, he is credited as having completed the first human-controlled space flight.

A lot of firsts happened between 1961 and 1969, but they came very closely-spaced in time, and this quiz only has ten questions, so we are skipping ahead to what many consider the crowning achievement of the 1960s in space, the successful mission to send humans to land on the moon. On 16 July 1969 Apollo 11 was launched from the Kennedy Space Centre, with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins on board. On 20 July (at 20:17 UTC) the lunar module landed; six and a half hours later Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the Moon. Buzz Aldrin joined him to conduct an exploration of the area for just over two hours, collecting rock samples for later analysis, before rejoining Michael Collins in the Command Module. The Lunar Module, nicknamed Eagle, this became the first to take off from the surface of somewhere other than the Earth.

The Apollo program continued through 1972, when Apollo 17 was the sixth mission to carry astronauts who walked on the Moon. Apollo 13 famously failed to land its crew, but they were safely returned after near-disaster.

During the 1970s there were a number of unmanned missions through the solar system, but for human space flight attention turned to Low Earth Orbits (within 2000 km of the Earth), where orbital space stations were set up to allow for conducting investigations into various aspects of life in space that might be involved in a mission to another planet. The Russian Salyut program sent six space stations into orbit between 1971 and 1986 (with the final one becoming past of the International Space Station).

A long-term orbiting space station required some way to get supplies there, as well as a mechanism for replacing the crews at appropriate intervals. The launch of the first Space Shuttle on 12 April 1981 (the 20th anniversary of Yri Gagarin's flight) marked this next stage's arrival. Five different Space Shuttle vehicles operated between 1981 and 2011, carrying out 135 different missions. These included launching satellites (and other objects, such as the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990), conducting experiments during flight, and involvement in the construction and maintenance of the International Space Station.

While humans are yet to travel past the Moon, other spacecraft have been sent to many parts of our Solar System, providing useful information about potential visits. Pioneer 10, launched in 1972, was one of these, becoming the first mission to explore Jupiter. It went further, having achieved sufficient velocity to be able to escape the pull from the Sun, and leave the Solar System. On 13 June 1983 Pioneer crossed the orbital path of Neptune, and was deemed to be the first craft to leave the Solar System.

This was not the end of the mission, and Pioneer 10 continued on its way, with its various bits of equipment still functioning to allow measurements, although as its power source became depleted fewer instruments could be operated at the same time. The mission was officially terminated on 31 March 1997, when its distance from the Sun was 67 AU (one Astronomical Unit being the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun), when the signals became too weak to be useful. Its flight was tracked (mostly as a training exercise for flight controllers in picking up weak radio signals) until 23 January 2003, when it was 80 AU away.

A robotic rover is an unmanned vehicle that is remotely controlled as it travels across the surface of an extraterrestrial object. In 1970 the Russian Lunokhod 1 became the first extraterrestrial rover, when it spent eleven lunar days (321 Earth days) traveling around the surface of the Moon.

In December 1996 the Mars Pathfinder was launched, landing on Mars in the Ares Vallis on 4 July 1997. It was composed of two parts: a lander now known as the Carl Sagan Memorial Station, and a robotic rover names Sojourner, which used the lander as the base for its exploration of the Martian surface. The mission was planned to operate for at least a week, with a month hoped for. In fact, it operated for nearly three months (with the last data transmission received on 27 September), and sent back over 287 megabytes of information, including 16,500 pictures and over 8 million meteorological measurements, as well as data about the soil and rock samples collected by Sojourner. It is not known exactly why communication failed, but it is likely that the main issue was a battery failure, as the rechargeable batteries had only been intended to last for one month's worth of charge cycling.

A space station is an orbiting vehicle in which humans can live for extended periods of time. the first one was Skylab, launched by the United States in 1973, and occupied by three different crews for a total of 24 weeks between that date and February 1974. It was during this time that the Space Shuttle program got underway in earnest, as the use of Apollo rockets proved problematic. Skylab was never intended to be permanent, and following the final crewed mission was allowed to continue making unmanned measurements until its orbit decayed. (Friction with the atmosphere, thin though it is at that height, caused it to slow down, and therefore move to a lower orbit over time.) On 11 July 1979 it disintegrated, leaving debris across the Indian Ocean (and parts of Western Australia, where the government attempted to gain compensation for the minor damage caused by issuing a fine for littering to NASA).

The USSR established Mir, the first inhabited long-term research space station, in 1986. The first modular space station (meaning it was assembled in space from smaller parts), Mir operated until 2001, setting a record for the longest continuous human presence in space of 3,644 days.

During the 1980s, the Americans abandoned their plan for another space station, and in 1992 plans were put in place for a joint operation between the Russians and the Americans. This started with the Shuttle-Mir program, which involved the US Space Shuttle visiting Mir, with cosmonauts having a chance to fly the shuttle, and astronauts spending some time in the space station. The ultimate outcome was the joint venture known as the International Space Station (ISS), the first module of which was launched in November 1998. The station is divided into two sections, with the Russians responsible for the development and maintenance of the Russian Orbital Segment, and the US Orbital Segment built and supported by representatives of the USA (NASA), European Union (ESA), Japan (JAXA) and Canada (CSA).

The ISS is primarily used as a scientific research station, with one of its originally-planned uses as a staging base for future missions to the Moon, Mars, and asteroids having been abandoned. It has been continuously occupied since 2 November 2000, with around 300 people from over 20 countries having spent time there. The ISS was originally planned to have a lifetime of 15 years, which has already been exceeded. The older modules are becoming increasingly unreliable, and in January 2022 NASA announced their plans to de-orbit the ISS (a euphemism for a planned destruction, so that the debris lands in a nicely empty part of the Pacific Ocean) in 2031.

When looking at travel between planets (or further, between solar systems), it is clear that liquid fuel rockets are limited in their capacity. Other proposals include solar propulsion, which uses the fact that light has momentum, which it can transfer when it impacts on any surface, in much the same way as a sailboat uses pressure from the wind on its sails. While you may not be aware of pressure from sunlight, it is there. To get a significant impulsion, you just need a really large collecting surface. In his 1865 novel 'From the Earth to the Moon', Jules Verne mentioned light and electricity as possible mechanical agents to allow travel to the moon and beyond. It became popular in Science Fiction, but was not seriously studied by scientists until the mid-1970s.

On 21 May 2010 JAXA (the Japanese space agency) launched IKAROS (an acronym for Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation of the Sun) on a mission to Venus, by way of a flypast of the Sun (an aspect of the mission referred to in its name, since Icarus famously flew close to the Sun in Greek mythology). It is acknowledged as the first vehicle to be fully propelled by sunlight. After passing Venus in December 2010, the probe continued on, allowing scientists to continue to collect data about interplanetary space and experiment with controlling the solar sail.

As reported during the mission, solar radiation pressure on IKAROS' 196 m2 sail produced a force of 1.12 millinewtons. To put this in perspective, if you hold a 100 gram object in your hand on the surface of the Earth, you will need to be pushing it up with a force of just under 1 newton. 100 grams is between 3 and 4 ounces, so the light pressure has roughly a millionth of the force needed to support a quarter-pound stick of butter. fortunately, in space there is little in the way of oppositional force!

If you are going to travel for years to another planet, let alone live there, you are going to have to grow your own food, as carrying a sufficient supply is out of the question. A number of experiments on the International Space Station have addressed that issue, and NASA announced that the crew members on the ISS had harvested lettuce (a red romaine strain called 'Outredgeous') on 10 August 2015, and were planning to eat half of it, sending the other half aside to be frozen for return to Earth for analysis. The lettuce had been grown in an experimental project called Veggie, establishing techniques to encourage plant growth in microgravity environments such as that found on the ISS.

A long-term space mission with a plant-growing facility would not only provide food, it could also help establish a stable ecosystem (using carbon dioxide for growth, and producing oxygen), and provide psychological benefits from the possibility of enjoying plants and flowers. While NASA's Veggie project has focused on lettuces, other plants being investigated for space farming include potatoes, rice, beans, grains such as wheat or barley, tomatoes, onions and cabbages.