The Science Quiz | On space exploration

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The Science Quiz appears thrice a week in the daily Science page. The page is available to read on all days except Saturday in the epaper.

Questions:

1. Name the vehicle that last month carried Italian Air Force-funded passengers on a private company’s first commercial suborbital flight mission to the edge of space and back.

2. This company was founded by a billionaire and earlier this year was selected by NASA to develop a lunar lander for a manned mission to the moon. What is the name of this company?

3. Five spacecraft have achieved enough velocity to eventually travel beyond the boundaries of our solar system. Two of them are Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched in 1977. The ___ ________ spacecraft, launched by NASA in 2006, is currently exploring an icy region beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt before it travels into interstellar space. Fill in the blank.

4. The Voyager spacecraft, and the more contemporary one launched in 2006, feature a power source to propel them that is known as a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. What is the specific radioisotope used in these RTGs?

5. In 2019, India’s Chandrayaan-2 lunar mission successfully blasted off into space from the Sriharikota spaceport. A crucial element of this mission, which unfortunately failed, was studying the lunar surface after touching down on the moon with a lander. What was the name of this lander?

Visual: In 1949, the ______ became the first human-made object to enter space after it was blasted into the skies by a rocket that consisted of a missile sitting atop a German-made V2 rocket. Fill in the blank. NASA

Answers:

1. VSS Unity

2. Blue Origins

3. New Horizons

4. Plutonium-238

5. Vikram

Visual: Bumper-WAC