Which spacecraft was the largest of its kind, Aryabhata or Astron?
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Aryabhata (satellite) Aryabhata (Hindi: आर्यभट) was India's first satellite, named after an Indian astronomer of the same name.
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Astron (spacecraft) Astron was a Soviet spacecraft launched on 23 March 1983 at 12:45:06 UTC, using Proton launcher, which was designed to fulfill an astrophysics mission. It was based on the 4MV spacecraft design and was operational for six years as the largest ultraviolet space telescope during its lifetime. The project was headed by Alexandr Boyarchuk.
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Garuda 1 Garuda 1 is an Indonesian communications satellite which is operated by ACeS. It was constructed by Lockheed Martin and is based on the A2100AXX satellite bus. It has two very large antennas, each measuring 12 meter in diameter. Launch occurred on 12 February 2000, at 09:10:54 GMT. The launch was contracted by ILS, and used a Proton-K/DM3 carrier rocket flying from Site 81/23 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
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Kepler-40 Kepler-40, formerly known as KOI-428, is an F-type star in the constellation Cygnus. Kepler-40 is known to host at least one planet, Kepler-40b. The star is approximately 1.5 times more massive than the Sun, and is over two times its size; it was, at upon its discovery, the largest yet discovered with a transiting planet in its orbit. Kepler-40 was first noted as home to a possible transiting object by the Kepler spacecraft; the data on the system was released to the public. A team of French and Swiss scientists used follow-up data to determine the existence of the Hot Jupiter planet Kepler-40b, and later had their results published in a scientific journal on January 4, 2011.
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ASTRON ASTRON is the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. Its main office is in Dwingeloo in the Dwingelderveld National Park in the province of Drenthe. ASTRON is part of Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).
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High Energy Astronomy Observatory 1 HEAO-1 was an X-ray telescope launched in 1977. HEAO-1 surveyed the sky in the X-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (0.2 keV - 10 MeV), providing nearly constant monitoring of X-ray sources near the ecliptic poles and more detailed studies of a number of objects by observations lasting 3-6 hours. It was the first of NASA's three High Energy Astronomy Observatories, HEAO 1, launched August 12, 1977 aboard an Atlas rocket with a Centaur upper stage, operated until 9 January 1979. During that time, it scanned the X-ray sky almost three times
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PSLV-C5 PSLV-C5 was the fifth operational launch and overall eighth mission of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle program. This launch was also the fifty-second launch by the Indian Space Research Organisation (IRSO) since its first mission on 1 January 1962. The vehicle carried and injected India's remote sensing satellite Resourcesat-1 (also known as IRS-P6) into a sun-synchronous orbit; this was the heaviest and most sophisticated satellite built by IRSO through 2003. PSLV-C5 was launched at 04:52 hours Coordinated Universal Time (10:22 hours Indian Standard Time) on 17 October 2003 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre.
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3.6 m Devasthal Optical Telescope The 3.6m Devesthal Optical Telescope is a clear aperture Ritchey-Chretien style telescope built by Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences(ARIES) and is located at the Devasthal Observatory site near Nainital, India. ARIES operates another 1.3m telescope at the same location. The telescope was activated remotely on March 31, 2016 by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel from Brussels. The telescope optics has been built in collaboration with the Belgian firm Advanced Mechanical & Optical System (AMOS).
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Kepler-11f Kepler-11f is an exoplanet (extrasolar planet) discovered in the orbit of the sun-like star Kepler-11 by NASA's Kepler spacecraft, which searches for planets that transit (cross in front of) their host stars. Kepler-11f is the fifth planet from its star, orbiting one quarter of the distance (.25 AU) of the Earth from the Sun every 47 days. It is the furthest of the first five planets in the system. Kepler-11f is the least massive of Kepler-11's six planets, at nearly twice the mass of Earth; it is about 2.6 times the radius of Earth. Along with planets "d" and "e" and unlike the two inner planets in the system, Kepler-11f has a density lower than that of water and comparable to that of Saturn. This suggests that Kepler-11f has a significant hydrogen–helium atmosphere. The Kepler-11 planets constitute the first system discovered with more than three transiting planets. Kepler-11f was announced to the public on February 2, 2011 after follow-up investigations at several observatories. Analysis of the planets and study results were published the next day in the journal "Nature".
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Hungaria group The Hungaria group is a dynamical group of asteroids in the asteroid belt. The Hungaria asteroids orbit the Sun with a semi-major axis (longest radius of an ellipse) between 1.78 and 2.00 astronomical units (AU). They are the innermost dense concentration of asteroids in the Solar System—the near-Earth asteroids are much more sparse—and derive their name from their largest member 434 Hungaria. The Hungaria group includes the Hungaria collisional family which dominates its population.
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Agni-II Agni-II (Sanskrit: अग्नि "fire"), is a strategic ballistic missile. The Agni (missile) family is envisaged to be the mainstay of the Indian missile-based strategic nuclear deterrence. The Agni-II is a medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) with two solid fuel stages and a Post Boost Vehicle (PBV) integrated into the missile's Re-entry Vehicle (RV). The Agni's manoeuvring RV is made of a carbon-carbon composite material that is light and able to sustain high thermal stresses of re-entry, in a variety of trajectories. The Agni-IIA is a more advanced version of Agni-II, albeit with more sophisticated and lighter materials, yielding a better range and operating regime. Agni-IIA was later renamed as Agni-IV plugging the gap between Agni-II and Agni-III. While the first test of Agni-IV in December 2010 was a failure, the second test flight in November 2011 was a success Agni-II, developed as part of medium- and long-range Agni series of missile systems, has already been inducted into the Armed Forces.
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Voyager 1 Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977. Part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System, "Voyager 1" launched 16 days after its twin, "Voyager 2". Having operated for 2017-1977- years, 11-09+ months and  days as of none }} , the spacecraft still communicates with the Deep Space Network to receive routine commands and return data. At a distance of 140 AU from the Sun as of September 22, 2017, it is the farthest spacecraft from Earth as well as the farthest man-made object. It is also the most distant object in the solar system whose location is known, even farther than Eris (96 AU) and V774104 (~103 AU).
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Mercury-Atlas 8 Mercury-Atlas 8 (MA-8) was the fifth United States manned space mission, part of NASA's Mercury program. Astronaut Walter M. Schirra Jr., orbited the Earth six times in the Sigma 7 spacecraft on October 3, 1962, in a nine-hour flight focused mainly on technical evaluation rather than on scientific experimentation. This was the longest U.S. manned orbital flight yet achieved in the Space Race, though well behind the several-day record set by the Soviet Vostok 3 earlier in the year. It confirmed the Mercury spacecraft's durability ahead of the one-day Mercury-Atlas 9 mission that followed in 1963.
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Full-sky Astrometric Mapping Explorer Full-sky Astrometric Mapping Explorer (or FAME) was a proposed astrometric satellite designed to determine with unprecedented accuracy the positions, distances, and motions of 40 million stars within our galactic neighborhood (distances by stellar parallax possible). This database was to allow astronomers to accurately determine the distance to all of the stars on this side of the Milky Way galaxy, detect large planets and planetary systems around stars within 1,000 light years of the Sun, and measure the amount of dark matter in the galaxy from its influence on stellar motions. It was to be a collaborative effort between the United States Naval Observatory (USNO) and several other institutions. FAME would have measured stellar positions to less than 50 microarcseconds. The NASA MIDEX mission was scheduled for launch in 2004. In January 2002, however, NASA abruptly cancelled this mission, mainly due to concerns about its price tag which grew from $160 million to $220 million.
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Qi Faren Qi Faren () is the chief designer for Chinese spacecraft since the launch of the prototype Shenzhou manned spacecraft in 1999. He was born in 1933 and graduated from the Beijing Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1957. Qi took part in the research and design of the People's Republic of China's first satellite - the Dong Fang Hong I, which was successfully launched, and stayed in orbit, in 1970. He was then appointed the general designer of China's spacecraft in 1992, following the retirement of Tsien Hsue-Shen.
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PAS-4 PANAMSAT 4, also known as PAS 4, was an American geostationary spacecraft that was launched by an Ariane rocket from the Kourou Space Center in French Giuana. The 3,043 kg spacecraft carried 16 30-watt C-band transponders and 24 60-watt K-band transponders and was expected to provide 320 radio channels and 120 "DirecTV" channels. The parking longitude is 69 deg E. (From NASA National Space Science Data Center)
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Chandra X-ray Observatory The Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO), previously known as the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF), is a Flagship-class space observatory launched on STS-93 by NASA on July 23, 1999. Chandra is sensitive to X-ray sources 100 times fainter than any previous X-ray telescope, enabled by the high angular resolution of its mirrors. Since the Earth's atmosphere absorbs the vast majority of X-rays, they are not detectable from Earth-based telescopes; therefore space-based telescopes are required to make these observations. Chandra is an Earth satellite in a 64-hour orbit, and its mission is ongoing as of 2017 .
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Pathani Samanta Pathani Samanta ( ; Odia: ପଠାଣି ସାମନ୍ତ born Samanta Chandra Sekhar Harichandan Mahapatra; 13 December 1835 - 11 June 1904) was an Indian astrologer and scholar who measured the distance from earth with a bamboo pipe and many other traditional instruments that he built. This earned him the "Mahamahopadhyaya" award in 1893. His observations, research and calculations were compiled into a book "Siddhanta Darpana" which has verses written in Sanskrit in Odia script.
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List of human spaceflights to Mir Mir (Russian: Мир , ] ; lit. "Peace" or "World") was a Soviet and later Russian space station, operational in low Earth orbit from 1986 to 2001. With a mass greater than that of any previous space station, "Mir" was the first of the non-monolithic, third generation of space stations, constructed from 1986 to 1996 with a modular design. The station was the largest artificial satellite orbiting the Earth until its deorbit on 21 March 2001, a record now surpassed by the International Space Station (ISS). "Mir" served as a microgravity research laboratory in which crews conducted experiments in biology, human biology, physics, astronomy, meteorology and spacecraft systems in order to develop technologies required for the permanent occupation of space.
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USA-223 USA-223, known before launch as NRO Launch 32 (NRO L-32), is an American reconnaissance satellite which was launched in 2010. It is operated by the United States National Reconnaissance Office. It presently holds the record for being the largest spy satellite ever launched.
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AsiaStar AsiaStar is an American communications satellite which is operated by 1worldspace. It was constructed by Alcatel Space and Matra Marconi Space based on the Eurostar E2000+ bus design. Launch occurred on 21 March 2000, at 23:28 GMT. The launch was contracted by Arianespace, and used an Ariane 5G carrier rocket flying from ELA-3 at the Guiana Space Centre. The INSAT-3B satellite was launched on the same rocket.
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Small Astronomy Satellite 2 The Small Astronomy Satellite 2, also known also as SAS-2, SAS B or Explorer 48, was a NASA gamma ray telescope. It was launched on 15 November 1972 into the low Earth orbit with a periapsis of 443 km and an apoapsis of 632 km. It completed its observations on 8 June 1973.