Her flight aboard the Vostok 6 spacecraft lasted for two days, 22 hours and 50 minutes. She orbited the Earth 48 times. She was 26 years old at the time.
Tereshkova was selected ahead of 400 other applicants and went through a vigorous training program before blasting off on June 16, 1963.
Her historic flight was greeted as a propaganda coup for the U.S.S.R., and after returning to Earth, Tereshkova was given many of the Soviet Union's highest awards.
She never made a second trip into space, but has said that she would like one day to fly to Mars, even if it meant a one-way trip. "I am ready to fly there without coming back," she told Russia's Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper in 2007 on the occasion of her 70th birthday.
Tereshkova has a crater on the far side of the moon named after her.
