About Dumitru Prunariu
Dumitru-Dorin Prunariu is a Romanian cosmonaut. He flew in space aboard Soyuz 40 spacecraft and Salyut 6 space laboratory. He teamed with the Soviet cosmonaut Leonid Popov. The backup crew was made of Romanian candidate cosmonaut Dumitru Dediu and Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko. In 1982 Prunariu was awarded the Yuri Gagarin medal of the International Astronautic Federation. On 12 April 2011 Prunariu was awarded by the President of the Russian Federation the Medal for Merits in Space Exploration. The inner main-belt asteroid 10707 Prunariu, discovered by American astronomer Schelte Bus at the Californian Palomar Observatory in 1981, was named in his honor on 13 April 2017 (M.P.C. 103977). In 1984 he was awarded the Hermann Oberth Gold Medal by the German Rocket Society Hermann Oberth – Wernher von Braun.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.