50 Space Exploration Trivia Questions

1. Which Apollo mission first carried humans into orbit around the Moon?

2. Who took the famous color Earthrise photograph during Apollo 8?

3. Which Apollo 11 crew member stayed in lunar orbit while the other two went down?

4. What large rocket launched the Apollo lunar landing missions?

5. How many landing legs supported the Apollo lunar module?

6. Which mission first took a drivable lunar rover to the Moon?

7. What science did Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt study professionally?

8. How many Apollo missions successfully landed people on the Moon?

9. How many times did Apollo 8 orbit the Moon before heading home?

10. What do the Apollo laser reflectors help scientists measure from Earth?

11. Which tiny rover rode to Mars with Pathfinder in 1997?

12. What cushioned Pathfinder as it bounced onto Mars?

13. Which rover was Spirit's identical twin in the Mars Exploration Rover mission?

14. In which crater did Curiosity land in 2012?

15. What lowered Curiosity on cables for its final touchdown?

16. Which crater was Perseverance's landing site in 2021?

17. What kind of flying machine was Ingenuity, carried to Mars by Perseverance?

18. What useful gas did the MOXIE experiment make from Martian carbon dioxide?

19. What instrument did InSight place on Mars to listen for marsquakes?

20. Each Viking spacecraft had a lander and what other main part?

21. Which planet did Cassini orbit to study its rings and moons?

22. On which moon did the Huygens probe land in 2005?

23. Which European spacecraft became the first to orbit a comet in 2014?

24. What was the name of Rosetta's small comet lander?

25. Which famous comet did Giotto photograph at close range in 1986?

26. Dawn orbited which two bodies in the main asteroid belt?

27. Which spacecraft flew past Pluto in July 2015?

28. What two-lobed Kuiper Belt object did New Horizons visit on New Year's Day 2019?

29. Which asteroid supplied the dust brought back by Japan's first Hayabusa mission?

30. Which asteroid did OSIRIS-REx sample in 2020?

31. What liquid flows through thin tubes in a spacewalker's cooling garment?

32. What links spacewalkers to the station so they cannot drift away?

33. What chamber lets astronauts pass between cabin air and the vacuum outside?

34. What does EVA stand for in a space mission?

35. Why do astronauts exercise regularly during long stays in orbit?

36. Why do astronauts float inside an orbiting space station?

37. In a bipropellant rocket engine, what reacts with the fuel to produce hot exhaust gases?

38. Why do multistage rockets discard used-up stages?

39. How many windows make up the space station's Cupola viewing dome?

40. What collects sunlight to make much of the space station's electrical power?

41. How many hexagonal segments make up Webb's primary mirror?

42. What metal gives Webb's mirrors their thin reflective coating?

43. Webb was designed mainly to collect which kind of light?

44. How many thin layers make up Webb's large sunshield?

45. Why did Webb's main mirror have to fold before launch?

46. In which year did astronauts install Hubble's first corrective optics?

47. Why is observing above Earth's atmosphere useful for Hubble?

48. Which kind of radiation does the Chandra observatory study?

49. What did Gaia measure to build a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way?

50. The Voyager Golden Records include spoken greetings in how many languages?