Science & Technology Quiz: Space Agencies and Missions of the World

NASA is the civilian space agency of the United States, established in 1958 after the launch of Sputnik, with its headquarters at Washington DC.

ISRO was formed on 15 August 1969, taking over the space work that had been carried on since 1962 by the Indian National Committee for Space Research.

Sputnik 1 was launched on 4 October 1957 and became the first artificial satellite to circle the earth, sending out a simple radio signal that stations across the world could hear.

The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin circled the earth once aboard Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961 and became the first human being in space, a flight that lasted about one hour and forty eight minutes.

India's first satellite was named after the ancient astronomer and mathematician Aryabhata and was launched on 19 April 1975 from a Soviet site, since India did not yet have a launch vehicle of its own.

The Mars Orbiter Mission was launched on 5 November 2013 by a PSLV rocket and was placed in orbit around Mars on 24 September 2014.

Chandrayaan-3 was launched on 14 July 2023 on an LVM3 rocket, and its lander Vikram touched down near the lunar south pole on 23 August 2023, releasing the rover Pragyan.

The European Space Agency was founded in 1975 by a group of European countries that decided to pool their space work, and its headquarters is in Paris.

JAXA stands for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, formed in 2003 by merging three earlier Japanese space bodies, with its headquarters at Tokyo.

The Chinese mission Chang'e 4 landed on the far side of the Moon in January 2019, the first spacecraft ever to do so, and released the rover Yutu-2.

Launched by NASA in 1977, Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter and Saturn, then continued outward and has since crossed into interstellar space, making it the farthest human-made object from the earth.

An Indian Air Force pilot, Rakesh Sharma flew to the Soviet space station Salyut 7 aboard a Soyuz spacecraft in April 1984 as part of a joint mission and spent about a week in orbit, carrying out experiments in biology and remote sensing.