EVOLUTION OF THE SPACE AGE

Today let about mankind's journey to space.it all started in the year 1942,when the German V2 Rocket created by Wernher von Braun ,it reached up to a height of 62 miles from the Earth's surface(boundary of space).Then in 1947 the first animals went into space such as fruit flies.They were used to study the effect of space travel on animals as they were very similar to humans.It wasn't to far off that the first monkey,Albert II was sent into space in a specially adapted V2 Rocket that flew 83 miles from Earth on 1949.In 1957 finally the Russians created Sputnik I the the first satellite with a transmitter implanted in it,which just needed 1 watt to run.It was the size of a human and it spherical part was the size of a beach ball. Then in 1958  Explorer 1 the first satellite launched by the United States,it was built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.Then finally the the first human,a Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was sent to space on 1961 and on the same year astronaut Alan Shepherd became the first American to go to space and at the end of the decade- President Kennedy challenged the country to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.In addition to launching the first artificial satellite, the first dog in space, and the first human in space, the Soviet Union achieved other space milestones ahead of the United States. These milestones included Luna 2, which became the first human-made object to hit the Moon in 1959. Soon after that, the U.S.S.R. launched Luna 3. Less than four months after Gagarin’s flight in 1961, a second Soviet human mission orbited a cosmonaut around Earth for a full day. The U.S.S.R. also achieved the first spacewalk and launched the Vostok 6 mission, which made Valentina Tereshkova the first woman to travel to space.

During the 1960s, NASA made progress toward President Kennedy’s goal of landing a human on the moon with a program called Project Gemini, in which astronauts tested technology needed for future flights to the moon, and tested their own ability to endure many days in spaceflight. Project Gemini was followed by Project Apollo, which took astronauts into orbit around the moon and to the lunar surface between 1968 and 1972. In 1969, on Apollo11, the United States sent the first astronauts to the Moon, and Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on its surface. During the landed missions, astronauts collected samples of rocks and lunar dust that scientists still study to learn about the moon. During the 1960s and 1970s, NASA also launched a series of space probes called Mariner, which studied Venus, Mars, and Mercury.

Space stations marked the next phase of space exploration. The first space station in Earth orbit was the Soviet Salyut 1 station, which was launched in 1971. This was followed by NASA’s Skylab space station, the first orbital laboratory in which astronauts and scientists studied Earth and the effects of spaceflight on the human body. During the 1970s, NASA also carried out Project Viking in which two probes landed on Mars, took numerous photographs, examined the chemistry of the Martian surface environment, and tested the Martian dirt (called regolith) for the presence of microorganisms.

Since the Apollo lunar program ended in 1972, human space exploration has been limited to low-Earth orbit, where many countries participate and conduct research on the International Space Station. However, unpiloted probes have traveled throughout our solar system. In recent years, probes have made a range of discoveries, including that a moon of Jupiter, called Europa, and a moon of Saturn, called Enceladus, have oceans under their surface ice that scientists think may harbor life. Meanwhile, instruments in space, such as the Kepler Space Telescope, and instruments on the ground have discovered thousands of exoplanets, planets orbiting other stars. This era of exoplanet discovery began in 1995, and advanced technology now allows instruments in space to characterize the atmospheres of some of these exoplanets.