Vostok 6

Vostok 6 (Russian: Восток-6, Orient 6 or East 6) was the first human spaceflight mission to carry a woman, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, into space.

Mission

The spacecraft was launched on June 16, 1963. While Vostok 5 had been delayed by technical problems, Vostok 6's launch proceeded perfectly with no difficulties at all. Data was collected on the female body's reaction to spaceflight. Like other cosmonauts on Vostok missions, she maintained a flight log, took photographs, and manually oriented the spacecraft. Her photographs of the horizon from space were later used to identify aerosol layers within the atmosphere. The mission, a joint flight with Vostok 5, was originally conceived as being a joint mission with two Vostoks each carrying a female cosmonaut, but this changed as the Vostok program experienced cutbacks as a precursor to the retooling of the program into the Voskhod program. Vostok 6 was the last flight of a Vostok 3KA spacecraft.

TV cameras inside the spacecraft broadcast live footage on the Soviet state television network of Tereshkova inside the capsule and she conversed with Premier Nikita Khrushchev over the radio. Communications with ground controllers about her overall health were described in postflight reports as "evasive" and later official accounts of the mission had somewhat condescending remarks about Tereshkova's overall in-flight performance.

Vostok

Vostok (Russian: Восто́к, IPA: [vɐˈstok], Orient or East) may refer to:

Vostok (sloop-of-war)

Vostok was a 28-gun sloop-of-war of the Imperial Russian Navy, the lead ship of the First Russian Antarctic Expedition in 1819—1821, during which Faddey Bellingshausen (commander of the ship) and Mikhail Lazarev (commanding Mirny, the second ship) circumnavigated the globe, discovered the continent of Antarctica and twice circumnavigated it, and discovered a number of islands and archipelagos in the Southern Ocean and the Pacific.

History

Vostok was launched in 1818 at Okhta shipyards, Saint Petersburg.

On 14 July [O.S. 3 July] 1819 Vostok under the command of Commander Faddey (Fabian Gottlieb von) Bellingshausen, the leader of the expedition, alongside Mirny under the command of Lieutenant Commander Mikhail Lazarev left Kronshtadt and on 28 January [O.S. 16 January] 1820 reached the shore of Antarctica, which was sighted for the first time in history. After repair in Sydney in Australia, the expedition explored the tropical parts of the Pacific, and on 12 November [O.S. 31 October] 1820 again turned to Antarctica. On 22 January [O.S. 10 January] 1821 the sloops reached the southernmost point of their voyage at 69° 53' S and 92° 19' W. On 5 August [O.S. 24 July] 1821 they returned to Kronshtadt.

Vostok (crater)

Vostok is a crater lying situated within the Margaritifer Sinus quadrangle (MC-19) region of the planet Mars that was reached by the rover Opportunity on sol 399 (March 8, 2005). Vostok is located roughly 1200 meters south of Endurance in Meridiani Planum. The crater appears to have been covered up with sand by the winds on the red planet, but many rock outcrops are still visible from the surface.

The rover's Mini-TES instrument was malfunctioning when it was near Vostok, however, the issues soon disappeared.

Other smaller craters visited along the way included Argo, Jason, and Alvin just south of the heat shield, and Naturaliste, Géographe, and Investigator.

While at Vostok, Opportunity investigated a rock dubbed "Gagarin", named for cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. It also imaged a soil sample named "Laika". The rover left on Sol 404, and headed south towards Erebus - an eroded crater wider than Endurance, some "etched terrain" and an even larger crater, the 750-meter wide Victoria.