astronomy :: essays research papers

Space exploration has been going on since the 1960s. Both women and men have traveled in space. Every day we are discovering different things about space from satellites and astronauts, and every day more people are landing on the moon. The first human, the first animal, and the first spacecraft in orbit, were all Soviet achievements. There are many reasons why space is explored and why people take the time to explore the solar system. One reason is that we want to find out how our solar system was created and how it works, and another reason is that we want to find out how all the planets move and how they change rotations. We also want to learn about everything on the planets and how to make advanced enough spacecrafts so that we can visit all the planets. The first man to travel in space was Yuri Gagarin. He made history on April 12, 1961, by orbiting the earth in the Votsok 1. His flight was one hour and 48 minutes long, going at a speed of about 17,000 mph on the Votsok 1 as he circled the earth. Gagarin was later killed in a crash of a test airplane. Neil Armstrong was the first person to ever land on the moon. He was born in Wapakoneta, Ohio, and after he graduated from college in 1955 he joined NASA. In 1962 he became the first civilian to enter an astronaut training program. In 1969 Armstrong lead the Apollo 11 mission and became the first person to set foot on the moon. His companions were Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., and Michael Collins. In 1971 Armstrong became a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. Valentina Vladimora Nikolayeva Tereshkova was the first woman to be in space. She joined a Soviet training program in 1961 and in 1963 she successfully orbited the earth 48 times in the Votsok 6. "Born Galileo Galilei, his main contributions were, in astronomy, the use of the telescope in observation and the discovery of sunspots, lunar mountains and valleys, the four largest satellites of Jupiter, and the phases of Venus." In December 1609, Galileo built a telescope of 20 times magnification, and with it he could see craters and mountains on the moon. He also saw that the Milky Way was made up of stars and looked at the four largest satellites of Jupiter.