Moscow - Russia on Sunday re-opned its cosmonauts museum after three years of renovation and expansion work. The Moscow museum, opened on the annual Cosmonauts Day, is four times as large as the previous faciltiy.

Moscow mayor Yuri Luskhov said at the opening ceremonies that Russia now had a museum where people could grasp the "magnificence of space." There was nothing comparable to it anywhere else in the world.

April 12 is celebrated every year as Cosmonauts Day, marking the April 12, 1961 first-ever successful flight in space by a human, when Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth.

The 8,000-square-metre Russian space museum features some 3,500 exhibits focuses on Soviet and Russian space exploration and research. Among others, there is a full scale model of the Soviet-era space station Mir which visitors can walk through.

The museum also includes a cinema and classrooms for visits by schoolchildren, as well as a shop selling space food items. (dpa)